In a virtual setting, students use their personal computers, i.e. a wide range of different hardware and operating systems. This makes installation of software a nontrivial task, and a wide range of distribution channels are available (some of which are compared in Table ). Many package managers, such as apt, yum, macports or homebrew are integrated with a specific operating system, which makes for a great user experience but puts a large burden on the instructor to provide dedicated installation routes for every operating system and test the software on the different architectures (commercial software vendors can make this work as shown in Case Study 2). Multi-platform package managers, such as Spack (Linux, MacOS) and conda (Linux, MacOS, Windows) improve upon this aspect but first need to be installed by the students which often requires a certain familiarity with the command line and can lead to interference with existing software on their machine. Container technologies such as docker are available on all platforms, address the problem of isolation from the host operating system and can be a great solution for providing a uniform software environment to a tech-savvy audience. In our experience, however, the lack of a graphical "desktop" with a familiar user interface can be a barrier for students who do not feel at home on the command line. This is where full-blown virtual machines enter the picture: a computer emulation which mimics a computer and operating system (OS) irrespective of the underlying hardware. This technology underpins many cloud providers as the same compute cluster can be used to provide on demand any flavour of OS -Mac/Windows/Linux for as long as it is needed. Using software like VirtualBox [24], virtual machine images can be run on all operating systems and provide both an isolated software environment as well as a familiar graphical user interface. For Case Study 3, we chose to use Quantum Mobile , a virtual machine image based on Ubuntu Linux that comes pre-installed with a wide range of simulation codes, tools for structure analysis and plotting, as well as for the compilation of custom software. The Quantum Mobile setup is modular, allowing instructors to create their own flavor of the image with just the software they need, by picking and running the corresponding ansible roles .