  This manuscript presents teaching and curriculum design for Information
Technology classes. Today, students demand hands-on activities for the newest
technologies. It is feasible to satisfy this appetite for exciting education by
employing server virtualization technologies to teach advanced concepts with
extensive hands-on assignments. Through utilization of virtualized servers,
students are able to deploy, secure and manage virtual machines and networks in
a contained environment. Various techniques, assessment tools and experiences
will be analyzed and presented by this manuscript. Previous teaching cases for
Information Systems or Information Technology classes are done using
non-commercial products, such as free VMware Server or VMware Player. Such
products have very limited functionality in terms of networking, storage and
resource management. Several advanced datacenter functions, such as Distributed
Power Management (DPM), vMotion and others, are not available in desktop
versions of that type of virtualization software. This manuscript introduces
the utilization of commercial software, such as vSphere 4.1, with full
datacenter functionality and operations for teaching Information Technology
classes of various levels.
