As a consequence of the migration of Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHW) to a modular school system, the practical training of the module "IT Infrastructure Management 2 (IIM2)" has been redesigned. Apart from changes in the training tasks, it was decided to organise the existing setup and workflow of the practical courses more effectively. After verifying different options to reorganise the required training environment, it was decided to use systems based on virtualisation technology.

Within the scope of this diploma thesis two powerful servers and a storage area network (SAN) were combined and configured to run the virtual training environment. The existing training environment, which based on a simulated company network, was reproduced in the new virtual environment and adopted to the changed learning targets.

Thereby VMware ESX Server provides the basic system platform to virtualize different server systems, which belong to the simulated company network. These server systems are run as virtual machines (VMs) under VMware ESX Server and use the SAN as storage space. As an addition to ESX Server, Virtual Center is used to hierarchically organize and manage the large amount of VMs. Without using Virtual Center this would have only be possible in a very restricted way.

The newly designed virtual training environment leads to an increase in efficiency and flexibility for practical training environments as required in IIM2. This gain occurs, because the initial setup and configuration of the simulated company network is not necessary anymore and would delay the practical workflow only for a short time in case of misconfiguration. It is very feasible that the used technology and system platform can also be applied to other practical training sessions at ZHW.