One of the things I have been working on this semester is trying to make my IT related classes more “real world”. I have setup Xencenter in the lab and have issued out VMs to lab teams where they can complete the assignments and have a persistent machine that won’t be re-imaged or lost between labs. I used to use thumb drives, but students lose them or the drive fails and corrupts the vm.
Each lab is building one portion of an enterprise system. DNS, Email, LAMP, Filesharing, etc. Soon we’ll attempt to install Asterix and setup VoIP and dialplans.
It’s an interesting experiment because each system has dependencies on others. The DNS lab is never really over because there are always more records to add as more services are put into “production”
