Will LabVIEW run in Windows Azure ?

[dbaechtel]

Will LabVIEW run in Windows Azure? If not, why not?

[smercurio_fc]

OK, I'll bite. Probably because it's not really an operating system?

[dbaechtel]

Windows Azure is built upon a standard Windows Server 2005 system with the addition of the Azure AppFabric functionality. It includes an OS as real as any other system.

Windows Azure does require a few specific items in the applications to run, like responding to the Azure Application Health Status check and the use of Web and Worker roles to respond to Internet activity. Other than those few things, just about anything that runs on Windows and .Net should run fine.

I just would like to see some of that nice Labview functionality running as an Azure Cloud service.

[dbaechtel]

Oh, and I forgot, Windows Azure also run applications that contain unmanaged code now. So the need for .Net compatibility is no longer a requirement.

[Dennis_Knutson]

My understanding is that applications for Azure are developed with visual studio running on a normal ms os such as windows 7. The application is then deployed to azure. Since LabVIEW can create web services, perhaps these can deployed. Perhaps not now, but in the future. Post your request to the Idea Exchange.

[dbaechtel]

Windows Azure applications can be developed with any tools on any platform. They are not limited to Visual Studio and a MS OS. In fact they can be developed using Eclipse now.

As long as they are packagd correctly they can be deplyed to the Azure Cloud.

[smercurio_fc]

Based on what I'm hearing I think Dennis' comment about the web service is likely to be the initial way it would be able to run in Azure. As he indicated, your best bet, if you haven't already done so, is to post your idea in the LabVIEW Idea Exchange.

[drval]

Have you tried to do this and gotten some sort of error?  If so, what was the error?  If not, why not just go ahead and try it to see what happens?

[ernestm]

Hi, I'm on the NI cloud team, and thought I'd chime in here even though the thread's old. We've been doing work with both the Amazon and Azure clouds.

We have LabVIEW working on Amazon just fine, in fact the LabVIEW FPGA Compile Cloud that's in beta right now is hosted on Amazon EC2.

We've been working with Microsoft Azure as well.  I haven't yet tried to deploy LabVIEW on it, it should be possible to try as of the Azure 1.3 release by using a startup task although those may have an eventual timeout (LV installs take a while). Azure role instances are not meant to be long running and the disk on them is completely ephemeral. Probably using a VM role would be better. This isn't guaranteed to work because various low level drive stuff may run afoul of the limitations (Azure isn't *quite* stock Win2008R2, it does have limitations). The wrinkle will probably be licensing.We had to bypass our own usual licensing scheme to work on the dynamic cloud for Amazon.

This is a good candidate for the idea exchange, perhaps I'll add on there too.

[Sean_W]

I am also interested in using LabVIEW 2010 "in the cloud"...

I normally run my LV2010 license on my desktop machine, the "usual way".  However, right now I'm loading a LabVIEW 2010 evaluation copy onto Amazon EC2.  So far, so good, but I am curious about how the licensing is going to work out.  Can I just keep on re-activating my LabVIEW license every time I launch a new Amazon EC2 instance?

FYI, I have two goals here:

(1) Develop LabVIEW code when I'm on the road and only have a low power, cheapo laptop available.  My laptop just doesn't have the horsepower to run LV2010.

(2) I have a LabVIEW application that takes 90 minutes (!!!) to compile into a Packed Library.  I want to offload that task onto Amazon EC2 while I continue to program on my desktop.