Supporting the education of CAD tools with hardware virtualization

The education of electronics technology e.g. circuit board design or systems´ simulation requires more and more IT resources as the corresponding computer aided design (CAD) tools rely on strong hardware support. Even in smaller groups more than 10–12 instance of resource consuming CAD tools are used simultaneously by students of a laboratory course. The preparing for and the execution of laboratory tasks can be supported efficiently by applying shared IT resources in the form of virtualization and cloud computing. We have successfully applied an ESXI platform on an IBM server cluster to provide a highly available strong resource support for our students preventing the continuous development of client stations in a regular 2–3 years period at our CAD laboratory. However our system has a smaller scope, the applied approach and techniques can be validated on similar projects presented in the related work. Nevertheless our framework uses unique solutions for realizing fault tolerance and easy restoring of the virtual environment.