For the past trainings that I attended, Bentley Promis-e, Citect SCADA and Unity PRO PLC, I noticed that training software are loaded into a virtual machine instead of installing it directly on the physical machines. Bentley uses the VMWARE Player while Citect/Unity Pro uses Virtual Box. Both virtual machines can be downloaded for free from their sites.
Why do they use virtual machines for training? There are some reasons which I know, there may be more.
- Easy deployment – create one virtual machine and just copy it into other machines.
- Easy maintenance – in case a virtual machine crashes, it could just be replaced by another working copy from a backup.
- Security – virtual machines are independent of the physical machines creating more secure environment.