Overview
Note: Resources in Shared Environments can only use the CloudShare Cloud (not the public cloud) and only on Accelerate. For a full description of Shared Environments, you may refer to [Beta] Creating and Managing Shared Environments - 2026. CloudShare’s Shared Environment feature enables multiple participants to access and interact within the same virtual environment (resources) over a common network, allowing instructors and participants to facilitate collaborative scenarios and group-based learning activities.
IMPORTANT: To ensure a stable connection for participants in a session, the user who creates an Experience that contains a Shared Environment should read the Shared Environment Host and Primary Connection section and ensure that all VMs in the Shared Environment are started, as described in the Recommended Instructor Procedure When using Shared Environments.
Which Participant is in a Shared Environment?
As always, the center of the Instructor Console displays a thumbnail for each participant in the session, giving the instructor a real-time view of what each participant sees in their Participant Viewer.
At any given moment, each participant may be viewing either the My Environment tab (the participant’s personal environment) or the Shared Environment tab in their Participant Viewer.
A Shared Environment label appears in the Instructor Console above a live thumbnail when that participant is actually viewing a VM in the Shared Environment tab, as shown below:
What Can an Instructor Do while Controlling a Shared Environment?
In the Instructor Console, the instructor is typically the default Controller and has access to the full range of Participant Viewer features and tools, as shown below:
Accessing the VMs of a Shared Environment
In the Instructor Console, an instructor can access the VMs of a Shared Environment by clicking the Shared Environment button, as shown below:
A list of the VMs of the Shared Environment is displayed.
Enables the instructor to access the environment and provides the Participant Viewer features, as shown below:
Enables the instructor to change the protocol used to communicate with a specific VM in the environment. Clicking the
icon next to the Protocol field provides access to this VM using that protocol’s standard network access features, such as RDP and CLI commands. Only a single user can be logged in to an RDP remote desktop or a CLI terminal at a time.
Who is the Controller? – Controlling the Shared Environment
The instructor who creates the experience is, by default, defined as the Controller of the Shared Environment for that session.
Only a single participant or instructor user can be a Controller of a Shared Environment at a time, with one exception described below. That user can actively work in the Shared Environment, while other participants watch the activity in real time.
IMPORTANT: If a user is a Host, then granting Controller permission to another user does not remove the Host's ability to interact with the VM. The Host can still perform actions, so both users may be able to control the same session simultaneously. See Shared Environment Hosts and the Primary Connection for more information.
The name of the current Controller appears in the Controlled By field in the Shared Environment area of the Instructor Console, as shown below:
To assign a different user as the Controller:
- In the Controlled By field, click the name of the current Controller, as shown above.
- From the dropdown list, select an instructor, participant or project member to take control of the Shared Environment.
Control is then transferred to the selected user, and all other users can watch the Shared Environment in real time in the Participant Viewer or Instructor Console.
Note: User-hour consumption is the same as in any other running environment, and usage is logged for the instructor.
Note: It may take a few minutes to create the network and connect it. It will only be seen in the Viewer after it has been created.
Note: Each participant thumbnail in the Instructor Console shows the participant’s current activity. The Zoom In options are unavailable while that participant is viewing or controlling the Shared Environment. If the participant switches to the Shared Environment while the Controller is zoomed in on that participant, a message is displayed indicating that the action is unavailable. For example, as shown below: