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Frequently Answered Questions

Support

How do I get help?

The preferred channel is that you file a support ticket in our github account which is specially for this purpose. Please give as much information as you can, it will save us time having to ask you for it. For example:

Virtual Machines

What software is installed on the Virtual Machines?

We’re aiming for consistency between the flavours of Windows and Linux, so they should eventually (Easter 2025) have the same versions of everything installed on all OS flavours. We’re not quite there yet, but we’re close. The software we’re curating is:

How much will my VM cost?

VM prices vary considerably, depending on the number of CPUs and the amount of memory. The VM flavours we currently offer vary in price from about £60/month for a small Linux machine to over £4000/month for the largest GPU flavour running Windows, see the table for more details.

Machines with GPUs cost a lot more than machines with only normal CPUs. There are many other flavours of GPU available in Azure, we can add them to the SDE if you need them.

Windows VMs cost more than Linux VMs because of the Windows license. We try to maintain the same set of software on both platforms, so if you can use Linux, you may be able to save money too.

A VM only incurs cost while it’s running. If you Stop the VM, it will not cost you anything until you Start it again. So if you only use a VM during office hours, you can expect it to cost 1/3 of the price shown below.

Type name #CPUs RAM (GB) #GPUs Linux (£/month) Windows (£/month)
Standard_D2s_v5 2 8 - 65 120
Standard_D4s_v5 4 16 - 130 240
Standard_D8s_v5 8 32 - 260 480
Standard_D16s_v5 16 64 - 520 950
Standard_D32s_v5 32 128 - 1000 1900
Standard_D64s_v5 64 256 - 2100 3800
Standard_NV6ads_A10_v5 6 55 1/6 x A10 330 490
Standard_NV12ads_A10_v5 12 110 1/3 x A10 670 990
Standard_NV18ads_A10_v5 18 220 1/2 x A10 1200 1700
Standard_NV36ads_A10_v5 36 440 1 x A10 2300 3300
Standard_NV36adms_A10_v5 36 880 1 x A10 3300 4300

What will the rest of my workspace cost?

Charges for Azure components in the SDE come down to one of three categories:

I can’t connect to my VM

Guacamole can be a bit flaky, and it sometimes takes a few goes to be able to connect to your VM. Here are a few things to try, in this order:

Software on VMs

R / RStudio

How do I install R packages on Ubuntu?

There’s a bug in the way R and RStudio are configured on Ubuntu in the SDE at the moment, which means they don’t succeed in installing packages in the usual manner (e.g. install.packages( "tidyverse" ) fails in both)

There are two ways to work around this. The first is to open a terminal, run sudo bash to become root, then edit /etc/R/Rprofile. You’ll see an extra double-quote in the middle of the proxy string, just remove that and restart your R session.

That will allow you to install packages, compiling them from source.

If you want to install binary packages instead, for speed or reproducibility, you can do it another way, via conda:

N.B. If this is the first time you’ve use conda in your virtual machine, first run conda init, then exit your shell/terminal and start a new one.

conda create -n my-env -y
conda activate my-env
conda install -y conda-forge::r-tidyverse
rstudio

From then on, for every new terminal session, you can just:

conda activate my-env
rstudio

Once rstudio starts, you should be able to require( tidyverse ) successfully.