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Creating Exercise Environments

Note

To provide the best learning experience, we offer two exercise environments and one Cloud CTF environment per course. However, if you require more exercise environments, you can either delete an existing exercise environment or request an additional course.

Adding an Environment to Your Course

Note

When adding your desired exercise environment, we recommend selecting the most recent version of the environment to provide the best possible learning experience. While we make every effort to keep our courseware as current as possible, some courseware may instruct users to use an older version. The version of the environment can usually be found in its title (e.g., Cyber Basics (2022.11)).

  1. To create an Exercise Environment, you should first navigate to your course in the Cyber Range. Once you have landed on your course page, select "Create Exercise Environment" to create an environment for your course.

    The "Create Exercise Environment" button is located at the top right of the course page.

  2. You will be shown a list of pre-built exercise environments. Choose one that is appropriate for your class.

    A "Create a New Exercise Environment" screen is shown with a dropdown list of potential exercises.

  3. Once you've selected your environment of choice, you will then be allowed to edit the title, description, and start and end times for the environment. Certain environments also have additional courseware and resources that goes along with the Virtual Machines. Under the "Resources" section, you can find additional content that will provide more information about the exercise and the courseware that goes along with it. The link will take you to the corresponding page in the Courseware Repository.

    A "Create a New Exercise Environment" pop up is shown, listing in descending order, the chosen environment, name, description, the resources section, and availability showing the start date and end date. At the bottom is the option to choose a persistent or non-persistent environment. A cancel and then confirm button are located in the right corner.

  4. After editing your environment information, you will have the option of provisioning a persistent or a non-persistent environment. For more information on persistent and non-persistent environments, please refer to our article Persistent and Non-Persistent Exercise Environments.

    A description of the environment persistence options is shown, and below it are the buttons for selecting your persistence option.

Note

The session and persistence type can be found in the Details section of your provisioned Exercise Environment. Please refer to our article titled Persistent and Non-Persistent Exercise Environments for more information.

  1. Once you have confirmed all details for your Environment, go ahead and create the environment by selecting "Confirm".

    The "Confirm" button is located in the bottom right of your Environment Details page.

  2. Once your new exercise has been created, it can be found in the Exercise Area of your course.

    The new environment will appear in the Exercise Area of the course, located below the Course Details.

Warning

To ensure optimal use of Cyber Range resources, approximately 15 minutes after a user ends their session (for example, by closing the browser window that is displaying their exercise environment desktop) or after 4 hours of use, an exercise environment will save any progress made and automatically stop. If this happens during a user’s active session, they can simply restart the environment. Following 21 days of inactivity, an exercise environment will be wiped and reset. This is designed to keep resources up-to-date while providing the best possible learning experience.

Exercise Environment End Dates

We encourage setting appropriate start and end dates to conserve Cyber Range resources and to allow you to evaluate your student's work. Setting an end date for your exercise environments can allow you to review the work students have done in the environments and grade them accordingly. Once the environment's end date has been met, students will not be able to establish any new connections to the environment and no additional changes can be made. However, instructors can still enter and access their students' environments to evaluate their work.

The exercise environment end date can be adjusted by editing the exercise environment's dates of availability. Please refer to How Do You Change an Exercise Environment Availability Date? for more information.

Note

Keep in mind that live connections to VMs will not be terminated when the end date is met (e.g. if a student is still actively working in their environment). If you wish to set a deadline at a specific time, the VMs will need to be stopped manually by the instructor.

Have a Question? Contact Support

We're here to help you. If you still have questions after reviewing the information above, please feel free to submit a ticket with our Support Team and we'll get back to you as soon as possible.