March of the (virtual) machines: past, present, and future milestones in the adoption of virtualization in computing education

  • Authors:

  • Alessio Gaspar;Sarah Langevin;William D. Armitage;Matt Rideout

  • Affiliations:

  • University of South Florida (USF), Lakeland, Florida;University of South Florida (USF), Lakeland, Florida;University of South Florida (USF), Lakeland, Florida;University of South Florida (USF), Lakeland, Florida

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Many courses in the computing curricula can benefit from hands-on pedagogical activities (e.g. active, discovery or problem-based learning) in the form of laboratory components associated with the lectures. While the benefits of such hands-on learning sessions are generally agreed upon, some system-oriented courses present a non-trivial challenge to instructors. Operating systems concepts (OSC), system administration, networking (NET) and computer security are all examples of courses which laboratories require students to have root access to be able to engage in meaningful experimentation of the lecture's concepts. With this constraint comes the need for more flexible technological support in the classroom. This paper reviews how virtualization has penetrated the computing educational practices over the past 3 years and identifies milestones toward its efficient integration. Our focus is on leveraging virtualization along with clustering technologies to provide an inexpensive, scalable, on-demand and transparent virtualization environment to students. We discuss technological alternatives to main vendors' offering based on our experience with the SOFTICE project. We conclude by presenting a prototype which extends further our objectives and discuss its potential for a GRID enabled version of our work.