This page gives you a general information. For now, we would like you to contact us so that we can help you and also gain information on ways in which this solution is going to be used.
Creting a Virtual Machine Image
Currently, there are two alternatives to choose from:
UTU Course Virtualization Team develops and publishes a number of virtual machines that are suitable as a foundation for many kinds of courses. You can simply download the one that best meets your requirements, import, run and install with the software needed in your course. Export procedure is a handful of clicks and then you can upload the image for your students to use. At this point, we would still like to hear from you and either recommend the best image or perhaps assist you in some requirements that could be useful for other courses as well. Creation of a virtual machine and installing the operating system into it is one of the most basic things that everyone does with their hypervisors. Nothing prevents you from doing exactly this, if you feel that what we can offer does not meet your requirements. We would like you to consider testing the virtual machine in all three major operating systems (MacOS, Linux and Windows) as well as with both hypervisors (VirtualBox and VMware) in all three OS'es. This is what we do with the ones we offer, just in case there are some unexpected issues. If you make your own virtual machine, you should still contact us as we can provide you with some start-up scripts that let students choose their locale and do some other useful personalization steps. That should save you some work and be worth dropping us a mail.
Modify one of our VMs
Create your own
Please contact us at vm-support@utu.fi.
There is some documentation available, which should be useful. More will hopefully become available later.
Publishing a Virtual Machine Image
This site is intended as the one-stop location for both students and teachers. In the upload page you can store your virtual machine image and set its availability (anyone, students, teachers, not-available). You can also give it a descriptive label ("name") and description, then give your students URL with search string that explicitly gives them your image - or just let the students search it themselves.
What you should be careful about are any licensing issues. Virtual machines we offer are not subject to any lisencing and can be freely distributed, but you need to be aware of any licensing that the software you install might have. In many cases, campus licenses exist and you merely need to limit the availability of your image to authenticated students (set availability "students"). In more restrictive cases, please contact us and we will try to solve the licensing requirements either with existing features, or in cases where similar requirements are likely to appear again, we will create the necessary features for you.
Maintaining virtual machine image
This part should be a relief - if your virtual machine uses no licenses, you have no maintenance tasks at all.
More likely, you will wish to update some software in your image - perhaps not even every year, but once in awhile. As far as virtual machine images are considered, that is not maintenance, but a creation of a new image. When that time comes, upload the updated image, set the availability and make the old image not available to anyone.
Removal of old images will be available in the next feature update in Spring 2021. If you wish to remove images (instead of just hiding them), please contact us.
If your virtual machine uses licensed software you should take care to remove its availability when the licensing agreement expires. If such images appear in this system, we will implement some tools for time limited availability or similar.