presents how to consolidate and implement Learning Management System (LMS) serve

Aye Chan Ko

Wint Thida Zaw

English

MERAL Portal

    Abstract— Nowadays, the massive proliferation of computers, portable devices, networking connectivity and digital education content has increasingly leaded to use ICT to transform and promote education. This paper presents how to consolidate and implement Learning Management System (LMS) server, Mail server and DNS server onto one physical server for effective use of LMS at University of Computer Studies, Kalay (UCSK). Virtualization technology is used in implementation of those servers onto one physical computer. As a result, Virtual Servers are running on a physical machine and students, teachers and staff can access web-based LMS server for course contents sharing, assessments by assignments or quizzes and Mail server for community collaboration.  Keywords— Virtualization, Learning Management System, Moodle, Mail I. INTRODUCTION LMS is a digital platfo rm used to administer and monitor the delivery of eLearning. Thus, many higher education organizations have been deploying LMSs to provide the educators to create effective online learning sites in universities, to build richly collaborative communit ies of learning, to deliver teaching and learning contents to students and to assess learning.  IT professionals can achieve flexibility in systems and applications by managing a virtual infrastructure. VMware offers a solution to improve the organization’s  profitability, robustness and responsiveness [9]. Thus, a physical server running on which virtual LMS server, Mail server and DNS server is implemented to deliver d igital contents to students and assess learning with assignments or quizzes and to build collaborative learning co mmunity. II. RELATED WORK LMS are widely used in most of the universities for promoting teaching and learning using ICT. The open-source LMSs are a good solution for sma ll and medium size Higher Education Organizat ions. In [1], it is described that some open-source LMSs such as Moodle, Sakai, Dokeos and eFront LMS, should be considered.  In [2], the authors examined various supports offered by Moodle for E-learning and described that Moodle is a great tool for tutors because it is a platfo rm to create and save teaching material easily and  a  co llaborat ive  online  p latform  for teachers  and students to learn together. According to Moodle    statistics     on   May    9,   2019,   Moodle   had  158,217,486 users  from 229 countries. Thus, Moodle LMS is selected to be implemented.  Because of the emergence of ICT, LMS is implemented using cloud and IoT technology. The framework for a future LMS enhanced by IoT capabilities  was proposed in [3]. In this framework, the university campus is transformed by utilizing IoT services into a smart learning environment. In [4], an Integrated Moodle System using VM Technology was implemented for higher availability and lower TCO.  The following sections present learning management system arrangement on virtualization server at UCSK. At first, network configuration is designed in section III. In session IV, server virtualizat ion is described and in session V, virtual servers’ performances are analyzed and finally we conclude the presentation in session VI.  III. NETWORK CONFIGURATION UCSK wired and wireless networks which connect computers and mobile devices spread over UCSK is constructed first. Private IP addresses space, 192.168.0.0/24 is decided to be used. IP address for each virtual server hosted on VMWare ESXi is statically assigned. IP addresses of all connected clients are specified dynamically. The detail information is described in Table I. TABLE I. IP Designation Devices IP address Subnet Mask DNS 192.168.0.6-10 255.255.255.0 Domain Controller 192.168.0.16-20 255.255.255.0 File server 192.168.0.21-25 255.255.255.0 Mail Server 192.168.0.26-30 255.255.255.0 Moodle Server 192.168.0.31-35 255.255.255.0  IV.  SERVER VIRTUALIZATION Server virtualization enables multiple operating systems to run on a physical server as efficient virtual machines. The key benefits are reduced operating costs, increased application performance and higher server availability. A virtual machine (VM) is an idea layer or the situation between hardware components and the end user. Virtual machines have a capacity to run any working systems on them [6].  Virtualization by a host operating system supports mu ltiple isolated and virtualized guest OS’s on a single Learning Management System Arrangement on Virtualization Server at UCS, Kalay Wint Thida Zaw,  Aye Chan Ko, Zo Ding Liana, Ngun Hnem University of Computer Studies, Kalay, Myanmar {wintthida, ayechanko.ucsm,}@gmail.com  MURC 2019, 24th - 25th May 2019, Yangon86   physical server with the characteristic that all are on the same operating system kernel with exclusive control over the hardware infrastructure. The host operating system can view and has control over the Virtual Machines. [7] A physical server is configured using VMware ESXi6.5, an enterprise class, type1 hypervisor on 16 GB of RAM, two 1000GB and 250GB of HDD computer. On this  physical server, three virtual machines (LMS server, Mail server and DNS server) are  hosted.  The UCSK virtualization system architecture is illustrated in Figure 1.    Figure 1.  Virtualization System Architecture  V. IMPLEMENTING VIRT UAL SERVERS A. Virtual LMS Server Implementation Moodle LMS is a web application which is Open Source software under the GNU Public License. Uploading assignment and lecture materia ls, providing quiz and prompt analysis on attempted answers can be performed with the use of Moodle LMS. Moreover, discussion, survey, forum and chat features are also supported for teaching and learning network. [10] LMS Components used in UCSK are  the sharing of lecture materials, provision of quizzes and assignment, checking the score and prompt analysis on attempted quizzes. The services offered from UCSK LMS server for the students are downloading lecture slides and notes, attempting quiz, checking score of the attempted quiz, uploading assignments and discussion within forum.  The services offered from UCSK LMS server for the teachers are provision of assignment and quiz, analysis of attempts and uploading teaching materials.   In order to provide those services, Virtual machine running Microsoft Server 2012 on virtual 500GB HDD is deployed on the ESXi server and Moodle LMS is implemented on it. And LMS admin perform the activities such as manage courses, create users and assign user roles. The specification of VM for local LMS server is described in Table II.  For getting the services offered by UCSK LMS, user has to access “http://lms-server/ucskalay as shown in Figure 2.  TABLE II. LMS Server VM Specificat ion Description Specification Guest OS Microsoft Server 2012 R2 RAM 8GB HDD 500GB IP 192.168.0.31 Domain Name lms-server   Figure 2.  UCSK LMS Home Page  The sample course page (CS-406 Artificial Intelligence) is illustrated in Figure 3.    Figure 3.  Sample Course Page  B. Virtual Mail Server Implementation The computers in the machine rooms at UCSK have no internet connection. In LMS features, we can send the email to LMS users. iRedMail is an open source and works on Ubuntu, Red Hat, CentOS, Debian, Free BSD and Open BSD. Thus, Virtual machine running Ubuntu 16 is hosted on the ESXi server. On this virtual machine, local email server is configured with the use of the shell script iRedMail.  The specification of VM for local mail server is described in TABLE III.  MURC 2019, 24th - 25th May 2019, Yangon87   TABLE III. Mail Server VM Specification Description Specification Guest  OS Ubuntu 16 RAM 8GB HDD 900GB IP 192.168.0.26 FQDN mail.cukalay.com  The following steps are done for setting up iRedMail on virtual server hosted on UCSK server. i. A fully qualified domain name (FQDN) is set as “webmail.cukalay.com” in /etc/hostname  ii. iRedMail is downloaded and setup iii. Location to store all mailboxes is set iv. MySQL is selected to store mail accounts v. Mail domain name, “ucsk.mm”, is added vi. Admin password is set for usk.mm mail domain [8]  vii. 247 accounts are created for teachers and students and set 1GB storage size for each account mailbox  Running local mail server allows us to store personal data email on hard disk of our own university server. Therefore, other organization can never see the contents of emails. Moreover, we can manage mailboxes size and create as many ma il accounts as we want and view mail logs. At UCSK mail server, there are 247 users under “ucsk.mm” domain and 1GB Quota is provided to each user as shown in Figure 4.    Figure 4.  UCSK mail users (Admin View)  V. SERVER PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS The Hardware Configuration, Host CPU and Memory usage and General Informat ion for DNS server is illustrated in Figure 5.   Figure 5.  DNS Server Virtualization Report The performance summary (1 hour) of each virtual machine is shown in Figure 6, 7 and 8 respectively. According to performance summary analysis, it was found that consumed host (CPU) of Mail server is very low. The Memory consumption is over  4GB.  Figure 6.  Performance Summary of DNS Server   Figure 7.  Performance Summary of LMS Server   Figure 8.  Performance Summary of Mail Server VI. CONCLUSION VMware ESXi server is configured and the virtual machines run on it. Thus, it could save money on IT costs and reduce the number of physical server to manage. All students and teachers can access services offered by UCSK virtualizat ion servers via domain name: https://webmail.cukalay.co m fo r Mail service and https://lms-server.cukalay.com for LMS service. User doesn’t need to memorize the IP of the server to access the service because of local DNS server configuration.  MURC 2019, 24th - 25th May 2019, Yangon88   ACKNOWLEDGMENT All teachers in UCSK who support in this work are acknowledged. This work was financially supported by UCSK research fund. REFERENCES [1] I. Dobre et al., “Learning Management Systems for higher education - an overview of available options for Higher Education Organizations”, in the 6th International Conference Edu World 2014, pp.313-320, 2014. [2] D. Chourishi et al., “Effective E-Learning through Moodle”, International Journal of Advance Technology & Engineering Research (IJATER), Vol. 1, pp.34-38, November 2011. [3] K. Mershad et al., “A Learning Management System Enhanced with Internet of Things Applications”, Journal of Education and Learning; Vol. 7, No. 3; pp.23-40, 2018. [4] H. Masuda et al., “An Integrated Moodle System Using VM Technology  to Achieve Higher Availability and Lower T CO”, SIGUCCS’08, pp.315-318, 2008. [5] V. Daloukas et al.,”The design of open source educational games for secondary schools” The1st internat ional conference on Pervasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments, PETRA’08, 2008. [6] Arun Prasath M etal., “Virtualization in Cloud Computing”, International Journal of Trend in Scientific Research and Development (IJTSRD), pp.875-877, 2018. [7]   D. Sarddar et al., “Architecture of Server Virtualization Technique Based on VMware ESXI server in the Private Cloud for an Organization”, International Journal of Innovat ion and Scient ific Research , Vol. 12 No. 1, pp. 284-294, 2014. [8] https://www.iredmail.org/ [9] https://www.vmware.com/ [10] https://moodle.org MURC 2019, 24th - 25th May 2019, Yangon89

Learning Management System Arrangement on Virtualization Server at UCS, Kalay

https://meral.edu.mm/record/6812/files/7%20Learning%20Management%20system%20arrangement%20on%20virtualization%20server%20at%20UCS%2C%20Kalay.pdf

Learning Management System Arrangement on Virtualization Server at UCS, Kalay

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

MERAL Portal