Employing Virtualization for Information Technology Education

This manuscript presents teaching and curriculum design for Information Technology classes. Today, students demand hands-on activities for the newest technologies. It is feasible to satisfy this appetite for exciting education by employing server virtualization technologies to teach advanced concepts with extensive hands-on assignments. Through utilization of virtualized servers, students are able to deploy, secure and manage virtual machines and networks in a contained environment. Various techniques, assessment tools and experiences will be analyzed and presented by this manuscript. Previous teaching cases for Information Systems or Information Technology classes are done using non-commercial products, such as free VMware Server or VMware Player. Such products have very limited functionality in terms of networking, storage and resource management. Several advanced datacenter functions, such as Distributed Power Management (DPM), vMotion and others, are not available in desktop versions of that type of virtualization software. This manuscript introduces the utilization of commercial software, such as vSphere 4.1, with full datacenter functionality and operations for teaching Information Technology classes of various levels.