Adoption of container-based virtualization in IT education

Abstract

Hands-on experience through the lab is one of the key components in Information Technology education because it provides students with an opportunity to learn and observe how to apply the concepts. Generally, the lab in IT education requires a variety of equipment such as PCs, servers, switches, and so forth. And virtual environment becomes an essential component in IT education since virtually multiple systems can be created, modified, tested, and deleted easily with little or no cost. Hypervisor virtual machines have been heavily used in IT education for last decade, but sharing the large resources with the host machine becomes a major limitation of such technology. Recently, emergence of container-based virtual machines provides a lightweight virtual environment over hypervisor-based machines. This emerging technology has not been explored well and adopted in IT education. In this paper, we will investigate and explore container-based virtual machines to provide framework for its adoption in IT education. We will describe step-by-step instructions on creating a cluster in single host and across different hosts using container-based virtualization technology. Afterward, we will evaluate and compare the performance of such implementation with a cluster built on physical machine.