Virtualized lab infrastructure on a budget for various computing and engineering courses

Educators in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields, especially in computing and engineering, must be flexible, up-to-date, and able to offer their students practical experience with continually changing information technologies. The importance of practical work in science and engineering, supported by lab exercises, is widely known. While it is desirable to create physical laboratories for teaching these technologies, it is not always possible nor feasible. Cost, availability, and environmental effects of physical space represent constraints on building physical infrastructure. Additionally, cost effectiveness is becoming increasingly more important, and purchasing a specific technology offers no guarantees that it will not soon become obsolete. In this paper, we present our response to these challenges in the form of an affordable, virtualized laboratory environment that can be used in a variety of computing and engineering courses, as well as in other fields, in lieu of physical computing labs. This environment allows instructors and students to build more complex settings than are typically available in physical laboratories. To date, the environment has been used at our institution for courses in computer networking, operating systems, database, programming and security, with plans in place for use in additional advanced computer science and information systems courses.