ALLANA MANAGEMENT JOURNAL OF RESEARCH, PUNE - Volume 3, Issue 1, January 2013- June 2013

Pages: 144-148
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SERVER VIRTUALIZATION: A COST EFFECTIVE APPROACH TO EDUCATIONAL INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGEMENT”

Author: Prof. Yogesh Ghorpade , Prof. Tajuddin Bennur , Dr. H. S. Acharya

Category: General Management

Abstract:

Educational Infrastructure Management is a costly affair. Libraries, Computer centers and laboratories, classrooms, Internet services, campus wide network are the basic infrastructure of any educational organization. Frequent replacements, up-gradation of the hardware, software in computer related infrastructure is often.

Many courses in the computing curriculum can benefit from hands-on educational activities in the form of laboratory components associated with the lectures. Over the past years, many problems related to the system administration of laboratories for system-oriented courses have found well-designed solutions in the deployment of virtualization suites. This technological advance enabled these courses to switch from a mostly descriptive content to learning activities which engage students in hands-on, authentic, problem-based learning.

Operating systems, system administration and networking are all examples of laboratories for which students need root access to be able to experiment with the concepts and implementation studied in the lectures. With this constraint comes the need for a more flexible classroom management strategy.

This paper explores how some open source virtualization and clustering technologies can be deployed to provide students, as well as instructors, with such an environment. We focus on providing solutions which can integrate transparently to any campus without involving significant changes to the classroom computers.

We also emphasize the scalability aspect by providing a highly cost-effective solution which can be easily scaled up as the number of students or the requirements of the course in terms of computational power increase.

Virtualization is also seen as one of the Green ITs which can help reduce infrastructure and maintenance cost especially for the organizations that may not be able to afford big capital investment upfront. Virtualization also eliminates the need to maintain and manage large, expensive systems across several campuses, giying colleges and universities a scalable, cost-effective solution that supports next generation learning, assessment, and development.

KEYWORDS

Educational Infrastructure, Virtualization, Virtual Machines, Green IT.