Integrating Virtualization Technology Into Remote Labs: A Three Year Experience

BackgroundMany colleges and universities are facing rising enrollments while the budgets have not been increased proportionally.In our program, enrollment has gone up significantly in the past few years, especially in the distance education (DE) section.How to use the limited resources to deliver quality education effectively and efficiently becomes a real challenge.To deal with this challenge, we have experimented with different virtualization options in the past three years.This paper is a follow-up to the studies 1,2 we presented at the previous ASEE conferences and summarizes our three-year experience.Virtualization technology allows multiple guest virtual machines to run simultaneously on a physical computer.The technology was first developed 3 at IBM for mainframe systems in the 1960s.The first x86 virtualization product, "VMware Virtual Platform" was released by VMware Inc. in 1999 4 .The year of 2009 is the 10th anniversary of this breakthrough.The x86 virtualization technology has gradually become more mature and stable since early 2000s 5 .Virtual machines were reportedly used for educational purposes in college computer labs as early as 2002 6,7,8 .However, the technology has not been adopted broadly until recent years due to a few factors: 1) the early virtualization products were buggy and not very reliable; 2) the virtualization software packages were resource-demanding and costly.Therefore they were usually hosted on high-end machines in centralized on-campus computer labs.Members from our faculty have been using VMware since 2002.In 2006, VMware Server was released free of charge for personal use.Microsoft released Virtual Server R2 for free download.Then we decided to migrate from physical computers to virtual machines in selected labs.The cost of creating and maintaining a virtual lab was much lower than that of building and maintaining a physical lab.It was easier to deploy new projects in virtual environments.We believed that virtualization technology had become mature enough and it would help us deliver certain laboratory courses efficiently and effectively. Virtualization Software SelectionCurrently there are many different virtualization software packages available, notably VMware Workstation, Server, and Fusion (for Mac), Microsoft Virtual PC, Virtual Server and Hyper-V, Sun xVM VirtualBox, Parallels Workstation and Desktop (for Mac), QEMU and Xen.QEMU and Xen are open source projects and are released under GNU General Public License (GPL).However, they are not as user friendly as some other virtualization applications.Xen can only run under Linux/UNIX systems with modified kernels. MicrosoftVirtual Server and Virtual PC are free for personal use.They support Microsoft Windows guest operating systems well but have inadequate support for other guest operating systems such as Linux and FreeBSD.Page 14.771.2VMware Player and VMware Server are also free for personal use.VMware player can be used to run a single virtual machine (VM) but cannot be used to create virtual machines.VMware Server can be used to create and run virtual machines; nevertheless it is only officially supported under Windows Server and Linux, not under Windows XP or Vista.Faculty and students can use VMware Workstation and some other VMware products free of charge with certain limitations if the department is a member of the VMware Academic Program (VMAP).Sun xVM VirtualBox is free for personal and educational use.The license is less restrictive than that of VMware.An open-source edition of VirtualBox is available under GNU General Public License.Out of all virtualization products we tested, VMware and VirtualBox are better choices for us.Both VMware and VirtualBox are user friendly and run under Microsoft Windows -the operating system used by most of our students.Mac users can run the virtual machines using VMware Fusion or VirtualBox for Mac OS X.As shown in Table 1 9 , both VMware and VirtualBox support a variety of guest operating systems, including Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris, which is appealing for instructors who plan to build a virtual lab with diversified platforms.VMware, with its 10-year history, is a proven product that is stable and reliable.VirtualBox is a new comer in the virtualization world and is supposedly buggier.We had minor issues with both VMware and VirtualBox but generally they performed well in most labs.VirtualBox is more lightweight than VMware.The size of the current version (2.1.2) of the VirtualBox installation file is 36 MB (32-bit version) or 40 MB (64 bit version) while the size of the VMware Workstation 6.5.1 installation file is 500 MB (32/64 bit version).Table 1.VirtualBox vs. VMware 9 Feature VirtualBox VMware Server / Workstation/ Fusion Supported host operating systems Windows 2000, XP, 2003, Vista, Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris 10U5, OpenSolaris, FreeBSD (under development) Windows 2000, XP, 2003, Vista, Linux (32bit and 64bit), Mac OS X Supported guest operating systems DOS, Windows 3.1, 95, 98, NT, 2000, XP, Vista, Linux, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, OS/2, Solaris, OpenSolaris, others DOS, Windows 3.1, 95, 98, NT, 2000, XP, Vista, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris 64bit host OS support yes yes