Hands-on Networking & Security Labs on Demand

Virtualization is one of the most effective ways to increase efficiency, boost productivity and reduce expenses in an enterprise environment through the deployment of a platform such as VMware vSphere Suite. In academic classrooms, virtualization has also been adopted but in the form of a standalone desktop application such as VWware Workstation, Microsoft Hyper-V, Virtualbox, and QEMU to name a few. However, these standalone arrangements require a large amount of resources to be available on each of the workstations in our networking and security lab. Also, these arrangement demand the software updates and upgrades to a large number of workstations. This environment is not efficient and even sometimes wasteful. A student often needs the full computing power available at their workstation, but productive time is also lost when the workstations are idle, unable to be shared amongst other students in or outside the lab. To address the efficiency and wastefulness issues of the networking and security lab at James Madison University, we have decided to use the VMware vSphere software suite that is typically deployed in enterprise operational environments. However, the issue with vSphere is that it lacks some of the basic functionality that is readily available on the standalone VMware Workstation software. Also, it limits the ability for each student or group to have their own hardware network interfaces when they need to integrate external physical networks with the virtual machines under vSphere. The vSphere suite was not designed to have dynamic networking where each user would be able to control and manipulate multiple VM’s and appliances internal and external to the vSphere Operating System (ESXi). As a result we embarked on an aggressive re-purposing of the vSphere suite to take advantage of its efficiency, while also increasing its robustness to match that of what is available on a VMware Workstation, in a project known within the department as Handson Networking on Demand. In this paper, we describe how two senior students and their advisor successfully virtualized the networking and security lab without losing any of the functionality that the lab currently has with the use of VMware Workstation. After many unsuccessful attempts to adapting the vSphere enterprise model suggested by VMware and others, the students gave up on the traditional architecture and creatively developed their own simple architecture. This architecture uses readily available appliances such as Untangle and takes full advantage of the pass-through of client hardware interfaces. After conducting trials with the new centralized architecture, the students found the lab experience much more pleasant and gained new network functionality that increased their creativity. We anticipate that the effort and time required by instructors and system administrators to set up and manage labs will markedly decrease, particularly, with the ability to centrally monitor the classroom progress and the students’ utilization of servers’ resources.