Lab hours exhausted problem

[manutavou]

Hi,

In my actual standard RHLS subscription, I still have 4 months left. It’s true that I took advantage of the time I had to study intensively. It paid off, since I was able to obtain the certifications I wanted and, as a result, earned the RHCA title. However, there is a problem. Since I still have one exam left out of the five offered, I started a training course (DO432), which I consider important for my OpenShift portfolio. I am also aiming for an OpenShift-focused RHCA.

This morning, I was unpleasantly surprised to receive a message saying that my lab hours are exhausted. Does this mean that only renewing my subscription would give me more lab hours? Is there another way to acquire additional lab hours? I mention this because, in the past, this was never the case. As far as I remember, the lab hour counter only stopped at the end of the subscription period.

What should I do? Training without lab access is not very useful.

[Robvd46]

I dont have an answer for you, but I am very worried about this as well.

The learning sub is incredibly expensive, and a bunch of lab time is used just to start the environments. 

This is something that really needs some attention from RH.

[bktpl]

Appreciate, Dear REDHAT if You give much more hours for this money. At least 1000 should be there.

[TudorRaduta]

@Jacqueline FYI on the lab hours feedback, not sure if this should go to you or someone else.

[Travis]

@manutavou -

First congratulations on a wonderful feat as it seems like you just earned the RHCA title. That is an amazing accomplishment. It would seem based on your e-mail you have a good bit of time (in terms of days) left in your subscription, but you've exhausted the 400 included lab hours.

The time limits and lab hour limits are nothing new, however, some of the more strict enforcement might be for some users. At the top of your RHLS page on the home screen with "My Activity" you should see details about your subscription that shows Days remaining, Lab hours used, E-books claimed, Exams. These are all tools meant to help and assist users tracking their self-paced learning progress and keep track of what is available in the system.

In the past some of the lab hours counter wasn't stopping or preventing new environments or existing environments from starting allowing the hour limit to be essentially ignored so it would seem you had unlimited hours as it would be at 400/400 hours and still let you launch a lab. I'm copying a couple people from our platform team @KierstenGrey and @cschunke to possibly provide more insight and address specific questions.

I'm also sharing a few resources about the learning subscription ...

https://www.redhat.com/en/resources/learning-subscription-options-faq

https://www.redhat.com/en/services/certification/rhca

I'm not in sales or customer service, so I can only provide you with information and not actual solutions. However, one of the benefits of the RHLS subscription once you attain an RHCA is that renewed subscriptions are eligible for a 50% discount.

Unfortunately, this is all the help and insight I can offer at this time, but hopefully the post and those tagged might help lead you to a beneficial resolution of the issue and also help us evaluate the RHLS subscription for additional use cases.

[Chetan_Tiwary_]

@manutavou yes lab hours are limited upto 400 hours during a subscription period. If you have raise a support case in this regard - I suggest you need to wait for the official response. 

[manutavou]

Hi all,

Because of the time it takes for the training platform and the lab environment to start up, the lab often remains active from one chapter to the next. Typically, a learner stops the lab only once they have completed the learning program they planned for that session. During a training session, the learner alternates between reading the course material or watching the chapter videos, and then moves on to the practical exercise—which is the only moment when the lab is actually used.

However, the lab timer continues to run throughout the entire session, even when the learner is not interacting with the lab environment. As a result, a significant portion of the consumed lab time corresponds to periods when the lab is active but not being used. In practice, the lab is effectively used for only about half of the time during which it is considered active.

If the lab timer were to count only during the actual hands-on practice phase—when the environment is genuinely in use—that would be perfectly understandable. But counting down lab hours while learners are simply studying the material or watching videos greatly reduces the effective value of the subscription and accelerates the exhaustion of lab hours.

I believe the team responsible for the RHLS platform should take this observation into account, as the current behavior has a direct and significant impact on the learning experience and the overall value provided to subscribers.

[Chetan_Tiwary_]

@manutavou did not understand your post correctly , did you mean that even if labs are stopped - and learners are reading course lecture and not doing any labs - lab hours are getting consumed ?

[manutavou]

@Chetan 

Thank you for your reply. Let me clarify the situation more precisely.

In the RHLS workflow, the lab environment is actually used only during the guided exercises, between the lab start and lab finish commands. After completing the exercise for one chapter, learners typically move on to the next chapter to read the course material or watch the video, and then start the next guided exercise when they reach it. The lab is usually stopped only when the learner considers the entire learning session to be finished.

Because of this, the lab often remains active even during periods when the learner is not interacting with it at all. This is also evident from the notifications received during the reading phases, offering the option to extend lab time—even though no hands-on lab work is being performed at that moment.

In practice, this means that what is currently labelled as “Lab hours” actually functions more like “Session hours”, since it measures the total duration during which the training platform remains active—not the actual time spent using the lab environment. As a result, the timer decreases even during passive study phases, which significantly reduces the effective hands-on learning time available.

If the timer were synchronized strictly with the lab start and lab finish commands, it would accurately reflect true lab usage rather than the overall session duration.

My question is therefore the following:
Are learners expected to manually stop the lab after each guided exercise and restart it at the beginning of the next one (despite the often long startup process) to avoid consuming lab hours unnecessarily?

If this is indeed the intended behavior, it would be very helpful to clarify it, as it differs from how the platform behaved in previous years.

[Travis]

@manutavou -

So you are correct about the lab running in the background, but synchronizing the lab hours and timer to "lab start" and "lab finish" doesn't make sense either as the machines and VMs are still powered on consuming cloud resources. Each lab environment is made up of a number of VMs which consume storage, networking, RAM (memory), and CPU. Running these resources is a fixed cost whether they are sitting idle or whether you are actually typing something at the command-line and interactively going through labs. 

The notifications from the lab environment are for the shutdown timer. Unfortunately when you are actively using the lab, it also doesn't know so the notifications are in place for in the event you are working on a lab or exercise, it gives a warning before the lab shuts down. There is no way to provide that warning from the virtual machine (workstation) so teh platform that launched the system and has the timer notifies you in that page.

The platform has always had the fixed number of hours, but there were some bugs and issues of enforcement as on some people's environments the counter either didn't work or it would get to 400/400, and still let you have a lab running and no longer track hours. 

I belive at this point the platform has been performing consistently across all regions and that the 400 lab hours is strictly enforced. I also agree that learners must make a choice on how to use the lab hours and plan accordingly ... some of the smaller (non-OpenShift) lab environments, it might be better to shutdown and power off between learning sessions if you think you will be spending a lot of time reading and doing the lecture as most of the environments are up within about 5 minutes, whereas some of the OCP environments could take 30 minutes to become ready.

Most of the courses we have are designed to run for 3-5 days meaning 24 hours of content to 40 hours content (that is with breaks and lunch), so you can look at that more realistically as 20 hrs - 36 hrs of actual lecture/lab time (if you were with an instructor).