Open source based virtual servers for IT labs

Practical experience is considered a vital part of university level courses in Information Technology (IT). A practical component of computer networking related courses, at the application level, requires multiple servers to be studied by the students. Many of such servers may be incompatible with each other and it may be required that they be installed on different platforms. This issue leads to increasing capital and operational expenses for the networking labs and consequently affects the cost and efficiency of the educational programs. The main goal of this paper is to share the experience of developing infrastructure for networking courses using virtualization technologies. The experience can be especially valuable to institutions in developing countries where resource constraints may be a challenging issue.