The development of a Virtual Lab for distance engineering education due to the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

A virtual laboratory for distance education was developed during the emergency of the COVID-19 pandemic to support the disciplines in which Computer-Aided Design (CAD) is indispensable. The OpenVPN® was used for remote access; the VMware® ESXi v6.5.0 was used for virtualizing environments; and the Windows Server® 2019 and the DebianTM 10 were used as operating systems. The Virtual Lab supports 210 users simultaneously and is useful 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The main results indicated that the proposed virtual laboratory is 24% less expensive than the most accessible commercial solution on the market; that the architecture of the virtual laboratory has an energy consumption between 33 to 50% lower than traditional approaches; and that 78.8% of the users considered the service offered stable or very stable, even with more than half (57.2%) having an internet speed between 10 and 30 Mbps.