Brief Project Overview in English

Z VirtlabWiki

The aim of the Virtlab project is to make networking lab equipment of multiple teaching institutions accessible remotely using Internet to give students more chances for individual practicing on real networking equipment. Students may reserve lab equipment for arbitrary timeslot and then access it using ordinary WWW browser with Java applets support. The interconnection of the topology is accomplished automatically according to the topology of the task selected by student from a collection of predefined tasks. The student may also ask to interconnect his/her own topology. The lab equipment is scattered in multiple lab sites connected to the Internet, which may either operate independently or share lab devices to create large-scale virtual topologies. The physical devices which best suits requirements of the particular topology reservation are found dynamically in all cooperating sites. The distributed nature of the resulting virtual topology involving virtual lines over Internet is completely hidden to the student. Advanced features such as virtual network probes, forbidden commands checking and support for guidance and evaluation of students' work by remote tutor are also implemented. Many useful prototypes of supporting hardware devices were also developed in scope of the Virtlab project.