IT 3300 : Virtualization

Course Introduction

Welcome

This course is about running other people's computers on your computers —
and doing it reliably, at scale, the way modern data centers and clouds do.

By the end you will have built, by hand, a small data center: virtual
machines, containers, and a Kubernetes cluster.

What you'll learn

  • Proxmox — run and manage virtual machines and a VM cluster
  • Docker — package and run applications as containers
  • Kubernetes — orchestrate containers across many machines
  • Cloud & IaC — do the same thing in the cloud, defined as code

The big picture

Bare metal
   -> Virtual Machines        (Proxmox)
      -> Containers           (Docker)
         -> Orchestration     (Kubernetes)
            -> Cloud + IaC    (managed k8s, Terraform)

Each layer runs on top of the one before it. We climb the stack together.

Your equipment

  • Each student is assigned at least 3 physical servers
  • You are the administrator: keep them up and healthy
  • Hardware problems -> see the instructor
  • Verify your switchport / VLAN assignment (see the equipment page)

How you'll be graded

  • Projects — hands-on builds on your own servers (the core of the course)
  • Exams — including practical, "make this actually work" exams
  • Capstone — deploy a full application across the whole stack

How to succeed

  • Do the labs on your own hardware, not just read them
  • Break things on purpose, then fix them
  • Keep notes and configs — you will reuse them all semester
  • Ask early; a stuck cluster at 2am is not a study plan

A note on staying current

This field moves fast. Tools you learn (Docker, Kubernetes, Proxmox) are
today's standards, but the concepts — isolation, declarative state,
self-healing, immutability — outlive any one tool. Learn both.