For the past several years, we have taught undergraduate and graduate level operating system courses using VMware virtual machines for project work. For this purpose, we had a dedicated laboratory with a bunch of PCs, all running VMware Workstation. Each year, we would configure a virtual machine with a relatively up-to-date version of Linux. The students would go into the lab, clone this virtual machine, and use it for their OS assignments. Some students would copy the virtual machine to their own laptops or desktop computers and use VMware Player to do the assignments in the comfort of their own rooms.
We now need to liberate that dedicated laboratory space for another purpose, and I am trying to set up a host system as a server on which students can run their virtual machines using connections over the campus network. We were able to squeeze new server hardware into the end-of-year budget, and we now need to set up the environment for next fall.
My question is:-- which host virtualization platform should we use?
We just started experimenting with ESXi, and we had some experience with VMware Server about four years ago. A typical operating system course in our university has 50-60 students. About half use the lab systems, and half prefer to use Player (or Fusion) on their own computers.The new server hardware has enough horsepower (CPUs, memory, disk space, disk arm bandwidth) for about 25-30 students, all of whom would be trying to complete their assignments under the same deadlines.
When I look at the documentation for ESXi, it rapidly takes me into vSphere Server and a lot of machinery that is appropriate for an enterprise data center but not our lab environment. This is more overhead that I can impose on our lab manager and teaching assistants. On the other hand, we like the idea of native virtualization of the ESXi.
Therefore, is there some other tool or environment that lets students log in, clone a virtual machine, and run it, crash it, and restart it in pursuit of their project assignments? Would it be better to give up on ESXi and use VMware Server 2.x? or what?
Any guidance and/or pointers to other documentation would be most helpful.
Thanks,
Hugh Lauer
Adjunct Professor of Computer Science
Worcester Polytechnic Institute