Instructor Needs Advice on Setting up a VMWare Lab

[JCTeacher]

I am an Instructor at a community college in California. I have taught computer information systems classes for a number of years covering a wide range of computing technologies. I have some experience with VMWare but only on a limited basis. I have been tasked with setting up a computer lab for the purpose of teaching the basics of VMWare and HyperV to students. The level of the classes will usually not go beyond intermediate skill levels. I have room for about 20 students in this lab. I have the following setup in mind.

20 desktop computers capeable of running Windows 7

20 low-end servers (think a budget Dell poweredge)

1 additional server with more storage to act as a storage server

Each server/desktop shared with a KVM switch

Each server and desktop booting from external sata docking station. (Each student gets two drives to configure for the semester)

Each server and desktop with 2 gigabit ethernet adapters installed.

48 port Gigabit switch

2 24-port, or 4 16-port switches and a couple of cisco routers in order to create some subnetting configurations

All the mice, keyboards, extra hard drives, moniters, and cables to connect everything.

I am reluctant to install a Storage Area Network at this time.

My questions to the group.

Am I going in the right direction?

Is the SAN really needed for my needs?

Thanks for any advice you could offer.

Regards.

[Dave_Mishchenko]

With ESXi you are now able to fairly easily virtualize other hypervisors like Hyer-V and ESXi itself so I might suggest this:

1) 20 workstations for each users

2)  2 - 3 more powerful servers (with lots of memory) so serve as the platform for virtualize ESXi / Hyper-V VMs

3) Storage - it could be completely local or on SAN.

The reason I suggest virtual ESXi / Hyper-V servers for your students is that to really learn the products you need more than one host.  A number of the core features like clusters and High Availability depend on at least 2 ESXi server plus a vCenter Server (the vCenter Server could be another VM or it could be running on the desktop that each user gets).  The students would also need access to shared storage, but this could be physical or virtual.

So briefly you would setup  a vSphere farm where each user would get up to 4 VMs.   2 would be for ESXi, 1 (optionally) for vCenter, and 1  (again optionally) for shared storage.   This setup would allow a user to setup vCenter, ESXi and then configure a cluster to gain knowledge on features like HA and vMotion).  The shared storage VM wouldn't require a lot of storage space as you would only need to get a single VM running.  Likewise the ESXi hosts would only need 8 GB of storage each.  So you could go with physical ESXi hosts with just local storage.

With the appropriate network design you could isolate the networking for each student to prevent conflicts or related problems.

[JCTeacher]

Thank you Dave,

"virtualize other hypervisors" is the kind of insight I really appreciate. I could begin with instructing the class on the basics. Then, students could install, configure, and manage the hypervisor as if it were a physical entity.

The reason I was going for a 1-to-1 desktop/server configuration is that it makes it easy for me to setup a new environment for each different class. I do not always need the extra machines but in some cases, like Hyper-V, or exchange server, they come in handy.

In your scenario, I would not have to "tear down" everything each semester.

Great food for thought!

[Dave_Mishchenko]

No problem.    You could also go with powerful desktops (16 - 20 GB of memory).