Creation of virtual machine laboratories – simulated planning and learning environments demonstrating function and structure of working machines – often involve a lot of manual labor. A notable source of the labor is the programming required due to changes in structural and functional models of a system. As a result, rapid prototyping of a virtual machine laboratory becomes difficult, if not impossible. We argue that by using a combination of semantic modeling and prototyping with a web-based system, more rapid development of virtual machine laboratories can be achieved. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a semantic, web-based virtual machine laboratory prototyping environment. Application of the environment to a case example is also described and discussed.