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Getting Started

About Range Control​

RangeControl (formerly known as OpenRange and CourseDeploy) is a set of Powershell Modules that have grown over time that support creating course lab and competition environments for groups of students. It is student driven in that the major component of the module is the roster of students. With this roster and a configuration that spells out the hypervisors, datastores, linked clone sources, roles and networks desired, you can rapidly deploy a course consisting of fresh non-configured virtual machines.

The post provisioning ansible scripts used to generate competition scenarios or customize the default state of the virtual machines is out of scope but may be covered somewhere else, particularly in the case of custom targets for Ethical Hacking. Stay tuned for project documentation on that later.

Getting Started​

We are going to keep the reference architecture very cheap. It will consist of two NUCs, a Switch and a ancient Synology NAS. Performance will be degraded due to not having a 10GiB storage network. In our college environment have a 10G storage switch and SFP's connecting that switch to a pair Synology Rackstation over a 10GiB fiber line. Each host is equipped with SFP's that also connect to the Storage Switch. We have a total of 16 Dell PowerEdge servers each with 40+ Cores and 512 GiB RAM.

Design Decisions​

  • Why include commercial products like vSphere and Windows?

    As an Open-Source advocate, I always chafe at having to use commercial Software to accomplish something when there is an open-source equivalent. I don't use office, I don't use Visual Studio often (unless I'm teaching C++), I use Linux exclusively as my desktop environment. That said, there are a couple exceptions.

    • vSphere. I've spent significant time with OpenStack and Proxmox and to some extent HyperV. You get what you pay for. vSphere is expensive but my college is a VMWare shop with the licenses in place to support lab systems. You can also get personal licenses relatively painlessly through the VMWare User Group. vSphere is very mature and though you can do many of the same things with OpenStack, you really cant do so as easily. The technical bar for getting an awesome solution up and running with vSphere is far lower than those associated with Open Source projects. The adage, Time is money applies here
    • Active Directory, This is an awesome product and always has been. LDAP is a more complex but free option. Again, my institution enjoys lab licenses and I imagine that those interested in RangeControl also have a Windows footprint in their organization. Visual Studio licenses are a moving target though at last look, an annual subscription that would get you lab licenses is somewhat cost prohibitive for the home lab environment. Consider evaluation licenses for Server 2019/22.

  • Why not AWS or some other cloud offering?

    • The VMs we use for courses are not fly-by-night ephemeral VMs. They are usually running and in place for months on end as the student slowly builds their environment over the course of the semester. 1-2000 long running and highly provisioned VMs would be cost prohibitive given the pricing model of most cloud hosting solutions.

Feature Demonstration​

🚧 Coming soon, once my youtube channel is sorted.

  • Deploy a Course
  • Provision Student VMs
  • Example Lab Environment