Virtual Training Labs

Virtual training labs, also known as virtual labs or online labs, are computer-based simulations or emulations of laboratory experiments that allow students or employees to conduct experiments remotely. These labs are designed to mimic the real-life laboratory experience and provide students or employees with the opportunity to conduct experiments, collect data, and analyze results without the need to be physically present in a laboratory.

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Advantages

One of the main advantages of virtual training labs is that they allow students or employees to access laboratory equipment and experiments that may not be available in their local area or school. This can be particularly beneficial for students or employees in rural or under-resourced areas, as well as for those who are unable to travel to a physical laboratory due to financial or other constraints.
Another advantage of virtual training labs is that they can be accessed at any time, from any location, and can be used for self-paced learning. This allows students or employees to complete experiments and assignments on their own schedule, rather than being constrained by the limited time slots available in a physical laboratory.
Virtual training labs also have the potential to improve the quality of education by providing students or employees with more realistic and interactive learning experiences. Many virtual training labs use virtual reality or augmented reality technology to create immersive simulations of laboratory experiments, which can help students or employees to better understand the concepts and procedures involved. Additionally, virtual training labs can also provide students or employees with real-time feedback and guidance, which can help to improve their understanding and performance.
In addition, virtual training labs can also be useful for employees training for specific job duties. For example, in a medical field, virtual training labs can be used to simulate surgeries or other medical procedures, allowing employees to practice and become more familiar with the equipment and procedures before performing it on live patients.

Limitations

However, there are also some limitations of virtual training labs. One major limitation is that they may not be as effective as traditional, hands-on laboratory experiences in helping students or employees to develop certain skills, such as problem-solving, critical thinking, and teamwork. Additionally, virtual training labs may not be as reliable or accurate as physical labs, as they may be subject to technical errors or malfunctions.
In order to ensure the effectiveness of virtual training labs, it is important to carefully design the online laboratory activities, and to provide students or employees with clear instructions and guidance. It is also essential to provide students or employees with appropriate feedback and support, and to use a variety of assessment methods to evaluate learning. Additionally, it is important to ensure that the virtual training lab platform is accessible to all students or employees and that it works on different devices and internet speeds.

Conclusion

In conclusion, virtual training labs have the potential to provide students or employees with new and exciting learning opportunities, and can be a valuable addition to the education or training curriculum. However, it is important to consider the limitations of virtual training labs, and to carefully design and implement these online laboratory activities in order to ensure that students or employees are able to achieve the intended learning outcomes. Additionally, it is important to supplement virtual training labs with opportunities for hands-on learning and interaction with peers and instructors.

Virtual IT Labs

Nothing is better than learning by doing.

Virtual IT labs are essential for IT education and training, as well as for IT professionals who want to test and validate new technologies. Whether you need cloud-based labs, hardware labs, or require custom equipment for your training, we can work with you to create your ideal lab setup.

Video of IT man working on a laptop in a datacenter.

Multiple IT lab hosting options to fit any scale and budget

ReadyTech has hosting options to meet and exceed your IT lab needs no matter the situation

At ReadyTech we understand that virtual IT lab requirements vary depending on technology, use case, cost, and other unique variables. Whether you want to connect using a third party cloud provider, host on our cloud, require access to bare metal servers or require access to custom equipment, we’ve got you covered.

Axis

Axis turns your AWS, Azure or GCP account seamlessly into a training delivery solution

With Axis, not only are you able to seamlessly schedule, create, and tear down IT labs on either AWS, Azure or Google Cloud. You also keep your team away from managing complex cloud provider consoles with its user-friendly training-focused interface. Training coordinators, curriculum developers, and instructors can easily manage course templates, lab plans, and class schedules. Instead of running your virtual machines 24 hours per day, Axis will give you the ability to easily schedule instructor-led classes and provide ondemand lab time for self-paced and blended learning, saving valuable computing resources and money.

Why Axis

Easy-to-use interface

Using the cloud provider consoles to manage and deploy labs is difficult and cumbersome and can result in high cloud provider costs. A key goal of Axis is to isolate training staff from the complexities of working with the cloud providers console. Axis provides an easy-to-use, training-focused interface allowing you to work with familiar objects, such as course templates, classes, and student seats.

Cost Effective

Running virtual IT labs directly through the cloud provider often results in high provider costs due to virtual machines being left running unnecessarily. You can avoid all that with Axis. It allows you to start, pause, and terminate virtual training labs according to a schedule. Virtual machines will only run when needed and nobody has to remember to shut them down at the end of the day. When the event has finished, Axis will make sure that all cloud provider resources such as virtual machines, storage, and networks are terminated.

On-demand lab access

On-demand lab access is becoming more popular by the day for self-paced as well as blended learning programs. Students have the ability to access labs on their time from anywhere in the world. By adding ondemand lab time to an instructor-led schedule students will be able to work in their hands-on labs after class supporting the concept of blended learning. For self-paced lab access you want to give the students the flexibility to access the lab whenever they want but still stay in control of cost. Axis will allow you to do both.

Easy scheduling

Axis is a training management application that allows the scheduling and deployment of your labs, with one of the major cloud providers. This means you can pick the best cloud vendor for your specific needs, whether that’s price, platform availability, regional availability, corporate policy, or something else.

Secure, reliable connectivity

Secure and reliable connections to the lab are critical. The cloud providers natively offer public access to lab environments using tools, such as SSH and RDP. However, many firewalls block this kind of access, resulting in students and instructors not being able to connect. Axis includes ReadyTech HyperView—a proprietary viewer technology—which allows users to access their virtual training labs using firewall-friendly protocols and without labs being exposed to the open internet. HyperView provides a secure connection and high performance remote desktop experience with just a browser. No downloads, plug-ins or extensions required.

Partner management

Using training partners (ATPs) to deliver courses is a common practice but using a partner network comes with some challenges too. One of the challenges is making sure the partners use lab environments that perform well and are matching the lab instructions. Axis makes it really simple to share lab environments and stay in control of quality and provide a consistent learning environment for students. Cost allocation can be handled in various ways by either making the partner fully, partly or not responsible for expenses associated with virtual IT labs.

Axis Hub

  • Instructor-Led Portal

    An all-in-one turn-key solution for instructor-led training delivery. Including a full-featured virtual classroom with audio, webcam, whiteboards, and polls. Course materials management and remote lab access all through a single web portal.

    Self-Paced Portal

    A high quality, on-demand learning experience specifically designed for self-paced learners. Access to course materials and hands-on labs in a single web portal.

    Axis

    Axis is a training management application that allows deployment of your virtual training labs to one of the major cloud providers. Axis supports AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.

    Axis API
    Included
    Google Authenticator

    with

    Instructor-led Portal

    An all-in-one turn-key solution for instructor-led training delivery. Including a full-featured virtual classroom with audio, webcam, whiteboards, and polls. Course materials management and remote lab access all through a single web portal.

    with

    Self-paced Portal

    A high quality, on-demand learning experience specifically designed for self-paced learners. Access to course materials and hands-on labs in a single web portal.

    with

    VM Management

    Automate deployment and tear down of virtual labs on the 3 major cloud providers.

    with

    Give instructors an overview and control of students' virtual labs. Other features include lab timers, inactivity monitors, help queues, chat, and screen sharing.

    VM Management

    Automate deployment and tear down of virtual labs on the 3 major cloud providers.

    LabManager

    Give instructors an overview and control of students' virtual labs. Other features include lab timers, inactivity monitors, help queues, chat, and screen sharing.

    Instructor-led Portal
    Self-paced Portal
    Included
    Axis API
    Google Authenticator
    VM Management
    LabManager
    Instructor-led Portal

    An all-in-one turn-key solution for instructor-led training delivery. Including a full-featured virtual classroom with audio, webcam, whiteboards, and polls. Course materials management and remote lab access all through a single web portal.

    Self-paced Portal

    A high quality, on-demand learning experience specifically designed for self-paced learners. Access to course materials and hands-on labs in a single web portal.

    VM Management

    Automate deployment and tear down of virtual labs on the 3 major cloud providers.

    LabManager

    Give instructors an overview and control of students' virtual labs. Other features include lab timers, inactivity monitors, help queues, chat, and screen sharing.

Instructor-led Portal
Self-paced Portal
Axis
Included
Axis API
Google Authenticator
VM Management
LabManager
Instructor-led Portal

An all-in-one turn-key solution for instructor-led training delivery. Including a full-featured virtual classroom with audio, webcam, whiteboards, and polls. Course materials management and remote lab access all through a single web portal.

Self-paced Portal

A high quality, on-demand learning experience specifically designed for self-paced learners. Access to course materials and hands-on labs in a single web portal.

VM Management

Automate deployment and tear down of virtual labs on the 3 major cloud providers.

LabManager

Give instructors an overview and control of students' virtual labs. Other features include lab timers, inactivity monitors, help queues, chat, and screen sharing.

Watch to learn more about Axis

ReadyTech is a cost effective employee training platform. It helps us get hands-on experience and it’s an excellent option for virtual training suitable for both employees and trainers.

Don’t want to use AWS, Azure or GCP, no problem

Host your labs in ReadyTech’s data centers.

ReadyTech’s data centers offer a number of lab hosting options to meet your specific requirements and budget. Whether you are looking for a cloud-based solution, or hardware environment or need a complete custom IT lab environment, we have a solution for you.

Global Infrastructure to connect anywhere

Cloud Labs

Our cloud was designed from the ground up to provide the ideal solution for global IT training labs.
All clouds are not created equal. With data centers in the US, Asia, and Europe your students get excellent performance anywhere in the world. ReadyTech’s cloud offers you the perfect balance between performance and price to meet the needs of any size training organization.

Not only has Johnson Controls reduced training costs, they’ve improved employee productivity 40% and experienced customer satisfaction levels well above 85%. Future plans include dramatically increasing their online training offerings, leveraging ReadyTech’s infrastructure to offer training to remote employees, and accessing a larger student market.

Better lab performance

Hardware Labs

Powerful bare metal servers for an ideal solution running hypervisor, ESXi, or Hyper-V.

Bare metal servers are the ideal solution when you need access to a hypervisor such as ESXi or Hyper-V and don’t want to jeopardize performance by double virtualizing on a cloud-based solution. A hypervisor can run many virtual machines per student and support any network topology. Beyond the lab quality IT professionals and students get faster response time, greater customization, and control of their lab environment. Basically, get options you can’t find in the cloud.

ReadyTech offers superb scalability - so now we can scale up and down as needed. ReadyTech also handles variable demand well, whether it's adjusting for the school year, software release cycles, class schedule changes - without breaking a sweat. They come through for us everytime.
Ben Schmitz
Training Services Project Manager

Custom Labs

Your hardware is not too custom or complex for ReadyTech.

As a technology company, we love custom hardware challenges. Whether you train on a proprietary network or security equipment, BIOS-level programming, or some abstract wireless equipment, we can host your virtual IT lab environment and scale it to your needs. We can host your proprietary equipment in our data centers or connect securely to your equipment in your office or data center.

Johnson-Controls-logo

Case Study

Johnson Controls partners with ReadyTech to reduce training delivery costs by 83%

This training initiative includes highly customized, virtual training labs that also increased their student pool through VILT software.

virtual training

24/7 Live Support

Successful training delivery solutions don’t stop at great technology and reasonable pricing. That’s why we provide complimentary 24/7 live support to all of our customers, instructors and students. So no matter where you are teaching or what time your students are accessing their labs, ReadyTech 24/7 live support is always available.

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