Suggestions for partition labs

Yes this can be done, and I have done this many times. You don't even have to add a new drive if you use one of the VMs supplied by the Linux Foundation; they all have at least 30 GB of drive with only 20 GB partitioned, quite deliberately for a number of courses which require making partitions.

We have quite consciously avoided giving detailed instructions for how to use the various hypervisors students can use, including virtual box, vmware, kvm, parallells, vmfusion, azure, etc. It's a rabbit hole and we don't want to provide tech support for these products. I know this from experience. It is difficult even in classrooms as it depends on what their hardware is, what OS they use and what version and/or distribution etc.

Finally, there are explicit instructions for how to do all these things throughout the course with real partitions. The loopback mechanism is a useful tool to use anyway you look at it. And it is fine to learn how to use it. It is not very good for real production systems as it is silly to go through the extra layer (host fs->loopback) but it useful for learning and testing.

By the way, the reason we attach the solutions to the pdfs is to avoid having to do two downloads (as well as two uploads for our course preparation staff). I only look at the "one big solutions" file for that reason, that is linked to early in the class. I find frequent downloads annoying