Professional IT Staff Use These Tools. Why Shouldn't We? Leveraging vSphere, vCenter, ESXi, and PowerCLI to Deploy Student “Corporate” Networks in a Foundational Cybersecurity Engineering Course

This paper outlines a method to streamline the setup and support of an introductory cybersecurity engineering course that uses experiential learning laboratory exercises. Experiential learning requires students to get direct, hands-on experience with real-world problems and solutions. The course under discussion is the first course in a series of three core cybersecurity engineering classes at a large Midwestern university that has earned ABET accreditation and the NSA Center for Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense (CAE-CD) designation. Course topics include networking, computer virtualization, secure configuration, and troubleshooting. During the 16-week semester students in the course build their own “corporate” network inside the ISELab virtual laboratory. They configure and secure services such as DNS, email, web, directory,firewalls, and VPN. Using a set of vSphere products including vCenter and ESXi, as well as the PowerCLI command line tool, a set of scripts were developed that allow us to rapidly deploy, modify, and delete multiple machines in each student's “corporate” network. The novelty of this contribution is the incorporation of industry standard tools into the administration of the course. The utilization of these tools significantly reduced setup and management time, enabled us to focus and enhance topics and lab activities, and made it easier to share the materials with other faculty members.