Virtual Technologies in the Networking Classrooms

Platform virtual machine technologies are playing a vital role in reducing IT budgets, energy, and space in networking classrooms. There are a myriad of feature rich platform virtual machine technologies such as, VMware vSphere, Microsoft Virtual PC, and Oracle VirtualBox to name a few. Most of these products can be used free of cost in educational environments. Incorporating these technologies can save a significant amount of resource to provide numerous servers/workstations to run a variety of operating systems and services. The author was able to provide to the students in a lab that had 12 student workstations and a blade server system with three virtual machines to run three different types of operating systems: Windows Server R2 HPC edition, Windows 7 Professional N edition, and Linux Fedora Core 15. These virtual machines provided students the freedom to install, configure, update, and remove software components to administer their servers and workstations, and to learn, and simulate the Internet in the classroom. The class was divided into five different networking regions representing U.S.A., Australia, Brazil, China, and Denmark. Because all of these computers had access to the Internet, quasi top level domains “.usa”, “.aus”, “.bra”, “.chn”, and “.den” were created to avoid conflicts with real domain names. A Linux server was used to isolate the regional networks. Students simulated the Internet by sending and receiving email messages from one network to another, e.g., from usera@cnit.usa to userb@cnita.aus and accessing each other’s web sites, e.g., www.cnit.usa, www.cnita.usa, etc.