Remotely accessible sandboxed environment with application to a laboratory course in networking

• Authors: William D. Armitage;Alessio Gaspar;Matthew Rideout
• Venue: Proceedings of the 8th ACM SIGITE conference on Information technology education
• Year: 2007

Authentic learning in an undergraduate networking course is best achieved when students have privileged access to their workstations and the ability to set up networks of arbitrary size and complexity. With such privileges come great risks for hosting networks. While the initial response to these challenges was to digitally isolate dedicated laboratories, today virtual machines are considered the best practice in setting up such labs. The authors' NSF-sponsored project, "SOFTICE", showed almost 3 years ago that open source virtualization solutions could solve classroom management headaches provoked by early solutions and also that they provide new pedagogical opportunities. Our project illustrates the milestones that adoption of virtualization by IT educational institutions followed, going one step further to sketch out what might be just around the corner. Instead of relying on deploying virtualization suites on each workstation, letting a set of pre-defined virtual machines run constantly on assigned hardware, or managing the transfer of large virtual HD images over networks, we opted from the start for a centralized hosting of VMs on a load-balancing cluster which abstracts the hardware constraints. As enrollment grows, more nodes can be added. As usage of some nodes increase, incoming remote connections are spread on idle hardware automatically. This paper discusses the achievements of the SOFTICE project in undergraduate networking labs and compares our approach to alternative solutions which recently emerged in the CS and IT education communities. More specifically, we discuss the clustering-virtualization technologies synergy and showcase some of the pedagogical benefits by detailing existing laboratories.