Leaders of the UNCW Cyber Defense Club (UNCWCDC) often face challenges when developing workshops for its members: How does one quickly and efficiently configure and deploy an operating system for a temporary learning/testing environment? The UNCWCDC leaders spend countless hours installing, configuring and deploying multiple system configurations only to decommission the operating system after needed usage is complete. This project significantly reduces testing environment setup times by establishing a virtual networking lab (ViNeL) that allows UNCWCDC trainers to spin up an entire network of virtual machines to simulate business environments and compositions. The application also allows club members to launch a single operating system for lab style experimentation. The application uses the remote desktop protocol (RDP) to make it platform independent. Built using Oracle VirtualBox on a LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP), the virtual networking lab is completely open source and can be implemented on a variety of server hardware configurations.

Recommended Citation: Riley C., Reinicke B., Simmonds D., Baker E., (2015). ViNel - A Virtual Networking Lab for the UNCW Cyber Defense Club. UNCW MS CSIS Proceedings. V. 9 , N. 9 .