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Cyber Range Pool Model

Abstract

This article will explain the concept of our Pool Model and cover how to set the reserved number of enrollments for your course.

What is the Pool Model?

The Virginia Cyber Range is dedicated to providing our users with the best experience while using our environments in the exercise area. To help support this, we introduced the pool model to alleviate the wait time experienced when booting up an exercise environment for the first time as as brand new exercise environments may take several minutes to completely warm up and be ready to use. With that being said, environments should become available in under a minute with subsequent start-ups.

The Pool Model utilizes a separate pool of pre-warmed environments for each individual exercise environment. The number of exercise environments in the pool will scale up and down daily based on how many users are expected to need them.

The Pool Model is particularly helpful for larger classes that use invitation codes for registration. The number of reserved enrollments will only be used to scale the number of exercise environments in the pool once an instructor creates a course invitation code and sets this value. By setting reserved enrollments when creating a course code, you can ensure that there will be enough pre-warmed exercise environments so your students can access their exercise environment with minimal delay.

Reserved Enrollments

The best way for instructors to ensure all course users can use their exercise environments without extended delay on first use is to properly set the number of reserved enrollments. This value can be set after creating a course invitation code and then by editing the reserved enrollments value.

You should first set the reserved enrollments value to to the total expected number of users. Next, you should add your chosen exercise environment to your course.

For example, if you expect to have 50 users in your course, you should set the reserved enrollments value to 50. Next, you'd deploy an environment like Cyber Basics. This would indicate to our system that 50 Cyber Basics environments are needed and it would begin preparing them for use.

Setting Reserved Enrollments

Reserved Enrollments can be set when instructors create a course invitation code in an existing course. This value can only be set after creating a course invitation code.

Warning

Please ensure that the Reserved Enrollments are set as close as possible to the approximate number of users you plan to have in the course. Overestimating the number of users can waste cloud resources.

Create an Invitation Code

  1. Select your course in the Exercise Area and click on the "Manage Course Users" button to navigate to the Users page.

    The "Manage Course Users" button is the third in the set of action buttons on a course page.

  2. On the Users page, click on the "Invitation Code" button.

    The "Invitation Code” button is the second in the set of action buttons on the users page.

  3. You will then be directed to the Invitation Code page where you can select the “Create Invitation Code” button.

    The “Create Invitation Code” button is on the right side of the screen above the “Edit Reserved Enrollments” button.

  4. A window containing the invitation code will appear allowing you to copy the code to your clipboard. Click the “OK” button to exit the window.

    The invitation code is located under the text “Invitation Code.” The OK button is in the bottom right corner.

Edit Reserved Enrollments

  1. Once you’ve created an invitation code, you can edit the number of reserved enrollments on the Invitation Code page. Click on the “Edit Reserved Enrollments” button.

    The “Edit Reserved Enrollments” button is located below the “Create Invitation Code” button.

  2. Once the window appears, enter the expected total number of users and then select the "Confirm" button.

    The expected total number of users field is in the center of the window. The Cancel button is to the left of the Confirm button in the bottom right corner of the window.

Note

You can update this value at any time.

What if I Didn’t Set the Reserved Enrollments?

If you are working with a larger class and haven't reserved any enrollments, we recommend starting all students' exercise environments at least ten minutes before they need to be used for the first time.

You can individually start exercise environments by using the power button next to your students' exercises to begin the warming process. A number of exercise environments will be pulled from the pool permitting them to start very quickly, while others may require several minutes.

You can also start all environments at once by using the "start all exercises" feature. You can find more information about that feature in our Start All Exercises Feature article.

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.