I've been helping one of the nice people upstairs prepare for some lectures he is going to present for his local community. Its an IT education class but concentrating particularly on domestic users and the dangers of the Internet - malware, phishing and the rest. Now his local council helpfully have a large IT facility with about 50 PCs in it which would be ideal for training except of course they have gone to an awful lot of effort to prevent anyone installing any sort of malware. This makes it impossible to demonstrate to your average home user how easy it is to pickup Internet nastyness on your usual sort of home PC.

 The title rather gives it away, but of course I suggested VMware ESX as the ideal solution, especially since they give it away free now.

Fortunately he has a couple of reasonable spec. servers that he can install ESX on and then its just a case of setting up a couple of basic XP and Vista demo VMs. Clone away as many copies as the servers can handle and we're ready to go, connect the ESX servers to a standard aDSL router with DHCP and create a vLAN to make sure the "Desktop VMs" are separated from the IT facility network.

Now it would be pretty simple at this point to just connect a laptop to one of the ESX servers, open the VI client and connect to one of our XP VMs. With the laptop hooked up to a projector everyone in the room will be able to see what's happening, so we can create a VM snapshot first, then browse to some suitably infested website and hey presto! look how quickly we've got a wrecked PC. Audience are suitably impressed, we revert back to our snapshot so we have clean install again and then repeat with another demonstration of clickjacking or whatever.

Although its informative to show the users how easy it is to get infected we also need to show them ways to protect themselves, so we'll have a couple of our demo VMs installed with popular Internet Security suites. Repeat the exercise of going to the dodgy website but this time show how our AV product protects us, and highlight why you shouldnt just click "OK" to every message on the screen. 

Now I'm sure you've got the general idea and can appreciate how ESX makes life easy here with the cloning and particularly snapshotting options, and it should make a pretty good lecture I reckon. However it got me thinking as I'm a firm believer in the theory that users learn far better if they are doing it themselves. What we need is a way to connect the IT lab desktops to the demo VM consoles, but frankly installing the VI client on each desktop and then asking the guests to connect is asking for trouble. I wasn't optimistic that I'd find a solution but I thought I'd have a brief look and found a few blogs which kind of answered parts of the question - have a look at my next post for what I came up with....