Virtual machines In Education

Abstract To provide education and particularly providing practical educational experiences to the students in the field of computing and information technology related courses including practical experience in the field of Networking, System Administration, and Operating Systems needs a lot of resources for the institution. Because this level of technical education can’t be provided only theoretically, students also need hands-on practical experience, and providing practical experience faces a lot of problems such as lack of funding and physical space, risks and threats to the network environment when we attempt to provide real, physical laboratory for experiments. This problem can be solved by developing a virtual environment for delivering students practical education. In this report we will look into different technologies used for virtualization today and do a comparative study. We will also explore some of the institutions, which are using virtual machines based environment to provide students practical experience in the field of computing and information Technology. And see how peoples are getting benefits from using virtual machines. We present how networks of virtual machines can be beneficiary for computing and information technology student and institutions by providing necessary environment in virtual network

Virtual Lab for Online Cyber Security Education

In this paper, the authors describe their experience of designing a virtual lab architecture capable of potentially providing thousands of students with a hands-on learning experience in support of an online educational offering. The authors discuss alternative approaches of designing a virtual lab and address the criteria in selecting the optimal deployment method. The authors suggest that virtualization offers a significant instructional advantage in delivering a cost effective and flexible hands-on learning experience

On a course on computer cluster configuration and administration

[EN] Computer clusters are today a cost-effective way of providing either high-performance and/or high-availability. The flexibility of their configuration aims to fit the needs of multiple environments, from small servers to SME and large Internet servers. For these reasons, their usage has expanded not only in academia but also in many companies. However, each environment needs a different ¿cluster flavour¿. High-performance and high-throughput computing are required in universities and research centres while high-performance service and high-availability are usually reserved to use in companies. Despite this fact, most university cluster computing courses continue to cover only high-performance computing, usually ignoring other possibilities. In this paper, a master-level course which attempts to fill this gap is discussed. It explores the different types of cluster computing as well as their functional basis, from a very practical point of view. As part of the teaching methodology, each student builds from scratch a computer cluster based on a virtualization tool. The entire process is designed to be scalable. The goal is to be able to apply it to an actual computer cluster with a larger number of nodes, such as those the students may subsequently encounter in their professional life.This work was supported in part by the Spanish Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad (MINECO) and by FEDER funds under Grant TIN2015-66972-C5-1-R.López Rodríguez, PJ.; Baydal Cardona, ME. (2017). On a course on computer cluster configuration and administration. Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing. 105:127-137. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpdc.2017.01.009S12713710

A Cloud-Oriented Green Computing Architecture for E-Learning Applications

Cloud computing is a highly scalable and cost-effective infrastructure for running Web applications. E-learning or e-Learning is one of such Web application has increasingly gained popularity in the recent years, as a comprehensive medium of global education system/training systems. The development of e-Learning Application within the cloud computing environment enables users to access diverse software applications, share data, collaborate more easily, and keep their data safely in the infrastructure. However, the growing demand of Cloud infrastructure has drastically increased the energy consumption of data centers, which has become a critical issue. High energy consumption not only translates to high operational cost, which reduces the profit margin of Cloud providers, but also leads to high carbon emissions which is not environmentally friendly. Hence, energy-efficient solutions are required to minimize the impact of Cloud-Oriented E-Learning on the environment. E-learning methods have drastically changed the educational environment and also reduced the use of papers and ultimately reduce the production of carbon footprint. E-learning methodology is an example of Green computing. Thus, in this paper, it is proposed a Cloud-Oriented Green Computing Architecture for eLearning Applications (COGALA). The e-Learning Applications using COGALA can lower expenses, reduce energy consumption, and help organizations with limited IT resources to deploy and maintain needed software in a timely manner. This paper also discussed the implication of this solution for future research directions to enable Cloud-Oriented Green Computing

Data center resilience assessment : storage, networking and security.

Data centers (DC) are the core of the national cyber infrastructure. With the incredible growth of critical data volumes in financial institutions, government organizations, and global companies, data centers are becoming larger and more distributed posing more challenges for operational continuity in the presence of experienced cyber attackers and occasional natural disasters. The main objective of this research work is to present a new methodology for data center resilience assessment, this methodology consists of: • Define Data center resilience requirements. • Devise a high level metric for data center resilience. • Design and develop a tool to validate and the metric. Since computer networks are an important component in the data center architecture, this research work was extended to investigate computer network resilience enhancement opportunities within the area of routing protocols, redundancy, and server load to minimize the network down time and increase the time period of resisting attacks. Data center resilience assessment is a complex process as it involves several aspects such as: policies for emergencies, recovery plans, variation in data center operational roles, hosted/processed data types and data center architectures. However, in this dissertation, storage, networking and security are emphasized. The need for resilience assessment emerged due to the gap in existing reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) measures. Resilience as an evaluation metric leads to better proactive perspective in system design and management. The proposed Data center resilience assessment portal (DC-RAP) is designed to easily integrate various operational scenarios. DC-RAP features a user friendly interface to assess the resilience in terms of performance analysis and speed recovery by collecting the following information: time to detect attacks, time to resist, time to fail and recovery time. Several set of experiments were performed, results obtained from investigating the impact of routing protocols, server load balancing algorithms on network resilience, showed that using particular routing protocol or server load balancing algorithm can enhance network resilience level in terms of minimizing the downtime and ensure speed recovery. Also experimental results for investigating the use social network analysis (SNA) for identifying important router in computer network showed that the SNA was successful in identifying important routers. This important router list can be used to redundant those routers to ensure high level of resilience. Finally, experimental results for testing and validating the data center resilience assessment methodology using the DC-RAP showed the ability of the methodology quantify data center resilience in terms of providing steady performance, minimal recovery time and maximum resistance-attacks time. The main contributions of this work can be summarized as follows: • A methodology for evaluation data center resilience has been developed. • Implemented a Data Center Resilience Assessment Portal (D$-RAP) for resilience evaluations. • Investigated the usage of Social Network Analysis to Improve the computer network resilience

Cloud computing and adult literacy: How cloud computing can sustain the promise of adult learning

Cloud Computing and Adult Literacy is the final report of an Alpha Plus Project to examine How cloud computing can sustain the promise of Adult Learning. The report includes a review of recent literature on cloud computing, on the role of technology in literacy, and on the characteristics of the Adult Literacy in Canada.AlphaPlus, Athabasca Universit

Distance Labs

This capstone paper is a compilation of the information we discovered during our research on the topic of distance lab environments for online computing courses. We provide our research, our findings, and our supporting evidence to answer the following question: How can La Salle University deliver a comparable hands-on learning experience for its online student population without requiring the students to attend on-campus? Initially, our research suggests a solution for the Economic Crime Forensics (ECF) courses; however, it will benefit all lab related computing courses at La Salle University. This paper will show: (a) that the goal of using a distance lab for the Economic Crime Forensics (ECF) courses is obtainable, and how it will benefit students by completing the lab assignments in the computing courses; (b) our literature review; (c) and our research findings from several sources. Our research includes discussions with La Salle University Faculty; sample sessions with three public cloud computing services: CloudShare ProPlus, Skytap, and Amazon Web Services (AWS); and implementations from schools using a private cloud service on-campus with the IBM Virtual Computing Lab Initiative (VCL) Model including how Higher Education is using commercially available virtualization software from VMWare (VCloud) on top of their own architecture

Internet Predictions

More than a dozen leading experts give their opinions on where the Internet is headed and where it will be in the next decade in terms of technology, policy, and applications. They cover topics ranging from the Internet of Things to climate change to the digital storage of the future. A summary of the articles is available in the Web extras section