  The interest in virtualization has been growing rapidly in the IT industry
because of inherent benefits like better resource utilization and ease of
system manageability. The experimentation and use of virtualization as well as
the simultaneous deployment of virtual software are increasingly getting
popular and in use by educational institutions for research and teaching. This
paper stresses on the potential advantages associated with virtualization and
the use of virtual machines for scenarios, which cannot be easily implemented
and/or studied in a traditional academic network environment, but need to be
explored and experimented by students to meet the raising needs and
knowledge-base demanded by the IT industry. In this context, we discuss various
aspects of virtualization - starting from the working principle of virtual
machines, installation procedure for a virtual guest operating system on a
physical host operating system, virtualization options and a performance study
measuring the throughput obtained on a network of virtual machines and physical
host machines. In addition, the paper extensively evaluates the use of virtual
machines and virtual networks in an academic environment and also specifically
discusses sample projects on network security, which may not be feasible enough
to be conducted in a physical network of personal computers; but could be
conducted only using virtual machines.
