Lab Requirements for Virtual Training

A lab is designed to walk a student through a set of exercises reinforcing what has been learned through assigned reading or lecture.  Normally this is delivered in a classroom setting on local computers. A Virtual Lab takes the physical classroom lab activity and delivers it remotely via the Internet.

  

Internet/hosted based labs should strive to provide the same functionality as the physical classroom experience.  There are also considerable benefits to hosted labs which are not available in a traditional classroom setup.  Let's take a look at what type of actions the student and instructor will do in a classroom training.

Lab Machine Interaction

Student

• Lab machine control (Start/Stop/Reset/Pause/Resume)
• Local console access
• Multiple lab machines used in a single lab
• Complex network configurations
• Switch between different Lab machines
• Access to the local DVD/CD-ROM
• Local audio/speaker access
• Local file storage/access

Instructor

• Lab instruction/demos
• Student/instructor collaboration on the same lab machines

In the next post, we are going to look at the hypervisor software which provides the virtual lab functionality.