Azure Lab Services -- Instructors Guide
Azure Lab Services is a cloud based classroom enabling students and instructors to access virtual machines (VM's) for lab assignments within iSchool courses. If you are an instructor for an iSchool (IST) course and are interested in having a VM provisioned for your students, please contact iSchool's Technology Services team by emailing ischoolit@ot.syr.edu.
Accessing Azure Lab Services
- Before instructors can access Azure Lab Services they must work with the iSchool's Technology Services team to have a lab environment created in Azure and a base virtual machine setup for the instructor to configure and serve as a starting template --to be duplicated and distributed to each student in their course.
- After Technology Services has created the lab environment, you can log into Azure Lab services by navigating to labs.azure.com and providing your Syracuse University email address and password.
Add Students to the Lab
Sending invitation emails to Students
Configuring Lab Template
Publish Lab Template
Interacting with Student VMs
- Switch to the Virtual machines pool page by selecting Virtual machines on the left menu or by selecting Virtual machines tile.
- You can start a student VM, connect to the VM, stop the VM, and delete the VM on this page. You can start them in this page or let your students start the VMs.
Quota for a user specifies the number of lab hours available to the user outside of the scheduled class time.
- When an educator turns on a student VM, quota for the student isn't affected.
- Each class section is budgeted and charged based on 150 quota hours per week assigned to each student for the entire duration of the class.
- Please do not change the total quota of your class. IT provides reports on lab spending and will investigate usage that exceeds normal costs.
Important Information
- As mentioned above, please manage the quota hours for your students and lab according to the needs and staying within budget.
- Template VMs incur cost when running, so ensure that the template VM is shutdown when you don’t need it to be running.
- Automatic shutdown & disconnect options should always be configured as such:
- Please reach out to ischoolit@ot.syr.edu with any issues or questions regarding Azure Lab Services.
- Exporting a modified Lab Template. This request can be triggered by a sudden change in the lab workflow. The change resulted in a new lab deployment to all sections of a course.
Scheduling an Asynchronous Lab Session. This request can be triggered by the need to speed up the boot up process if the Instructor have a planned lab session during a class hours.