Brief Project Overview in English

Z VirtlabWiki

The aim of the Virtlab project is to make networking lab equipment accessible remotely using Internet to to give students more chances for individual practicing. Students may reserve lab equipment for arbitrary timeslot and then access the lab equipment using ordinary WWW browser with Java applets support. The interconnection of the topology is accomplished automatically based on 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, which may either operate independently or share lab equipment. 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. Additional features such as virtual network probes, forbidden commands checking and support for guidance and evaluation of students' work by remote tutor are implemented. Many prototypes of supporting hardware devices were also developed in scope of the Virtlab project.