Many students are entering Computer Science education with limited exposure to operating systems and applications other than those produced by Apple or Microsoft. This gap in familiarity with the Open Source community can quickly be bridged with a simple exercise that can also be used to strengthen two other important current computing concepts, virtualization and cloud computing. Students can gain firsthand experience through the creation of virtual machines utilizing free LINUX distributions with pre-installed productivity software. This enables the students to have a greater understanding of these concepts and how they may be applied to meet their own needs, or the requirements of a corporate scenario.