Virtual Machines for Student Coding

[petben]

I need to provide a safe place for students to run small basic executable etc and thinking about making VM's available to them in a single IT Suite. so a few questions:

 

VirtualBox is free but does it provide a method for:

1. Admins to deploy a template VM
   
2. Students to be able to use VMs, but not create\edit them
   
3. The VM's to revert to snapshot at next reboot
   

 

VM Player looks better but is £50\machine

 

Any ideas or comments would be useful.

 

Thanks

[fiza]

Theres a whole lot of posts about this and loads of instructions here http://www.edugeek.net/forums/how-do-you-do/95325-virtualbox-image-programming-classes.html

[petben]

thanks, immutable images looks good for reverting any changes.

 

how do i stop students creating VM's in virtual box?

[fiza]

thanks, immutable images looks good for reverting any changes.

 

how do i stop students creating VM's in virtual box?

 

All the instructions are in that thread. You remove the management console but its been a while now since we did it. We just followed the excellent instructions others provided in that thread.

[kennysarmy]

All the instructions are in that thread. You remove the management console but its been a while now since we did it. We just followed the excellent instructions others provided in that thread.

 

It's still working well here - just get the odd student setting off alerts when they try and save their EXE's back to the main network....!

[fiza]

It's still working well here - just get the odd student setting off alerts when they try and save their EXE's back to the main network....!

 

How do you deal with that? Where do they save their EXEs as the VMs are immutable drives.

[synaesthesia]

All programs here are stored on their My Documents areas but not in a compiled state; they are free to fire up a VM to compile and run when they please and that has worked well since this was implemented. The only major change I made to our setup since the project in that aforementioned thread was to change the VM HDD to being centrally hosted on a NAS rather than copying it to each machine.

[kennysarmy]

How do you deal with that? Where do they save their EXEs as the VMs are immutable drives.

 

The rename the *.exe to something else....

 

They would n't be able to run the *.exe from their H:\ drives anyway....