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.


Azure Lab Services Instructor Overview:


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.

Configuring Your Lab Template:

It will take a few minutes for your template to start up.


This will present you with a download screen, looking to save an RDP file.
  • On windows you can open with the native Remote Desktop Connection application.
  • Mac users will need to install the Microsoft Remote Desktop application from the Apple App store to use the RDP protocol.
When an educator turns on a student VM, quota for the student isn't affected. Quota for a user specifies the number of lab hours available to the user outside of the scheduled class time.

Add users to the lab

You will see names of users in the list after they are registered to the lab.

Send invitation emails to users

Connecting to a Students Azure Lab Services VM:


Scheduling an Asynchronous Lab Session:


Please reach out to IT for the followig actions:


Important Info