ISCAP Proceedings: Abstract Presentation
Lab Environments in a Post-VMware World
Kyle Cronin
Dakota State University
Michael Ham
Dakota State University
Abstract
The landscape of cybersecurity lab environments is always changing. Many options exist; some institutions choose to make the capital investments to build their own lab infrastructure, while others opt to pay subscription fees for third parties to host lab infrastructure in the cloud.
Many options exist for third-party or cloud-based hosting; however, they are beyond the scope of this discussion. While not exclusive, several hosting providers provide curricula that precisely match scenarios within hosted environments. This is a great direction for institutions needing labs with curriculum, but it does limit institutions that build their curriculum, requiring custom-created labs to match.
Dakota State University has a long-standing history of building its own curriculum and lab environments to meet the needs of our faculty, students, and external designation requirements (e.g., NSA’s Center of Academic Excellence designations). Our lab environment has traditionally been based on VMware’s product offerings, including ESXi as a hypervisor, vCenter for cluster management, and vCloud Director as a front-end for the end-user (faculty and student) self-service.
These pieces integrated well for lab isolation, allowing users to provision their own resources, and for faculty to mass deploy labs to their rosters of students. Unfortunately, due to the changing business landscape, the expenditures relating to software licensing have become cost-prohibitive for institutions to operate under the existing model.
In evaluating alternative options, the university prioritized cost-effectiveness. The need to leverage existing hardware investments, maintain a similar user-focused self-service portal, and remain agile in the creation of custom labs and curriculum were key factors. After reviewing several platform options, the university has chosen Proxmox as the backend hypervisor for the academic computing environment. This transition not only meets our technical requirements but also offers significant cost savings.
Our goal is to share the university’s journey, the process of evaluating various platforms, the reasons behind choosing the current platform, and the future direction we anticipate. We have valuable lessons learned from this transition and we are eager to share these with the wider community.