Virtualizing an IT Lab for Higher Education Teaching

In universities, a great amount of time is needed to manage and operate lab course IT infrastructures. Additionally, university’s resources are occupied and teaching staff is needed to supervise the attending students. In this paper, we present a concept for planning and deploying virtualized IT infrastructures (hosts and network) for higher education purposes and show an implementation including tool supported management of the virtual environment. The management platform facilitates the administration of virtual machines by students and thus frees the teaching staff from that duty. As a proof of concept, a number of different teaching environments used in a lab course on IT security have been virtualized. The course is intended for graduate students and poses high demands on the infrastructure, its availability and its performance, while security aspects have to be taken into account. Concluding the paper, experiences made during two years of productive use as well as updating the system to new releases of the virtualization software are pointed out.