Provisioning virtualized datacenters through Virtual Computing Lab

Virtual Computing Lab (VCL) is an Apache licensed, open source, on demand, remote access system that dynamically provisions computing resources to end users. In the hands-on labs for the new course Virtualization Technologies, each student installs and administers a virtualized datacenter, which contains two VMware ESX servers, a VMware vCenter server and a data storage server. In a normal lab environment, these servers require high-end hardware to run. Instead of using expensive physical machines to set up the physical datacenters, we created a VCL virtual environment which included four virtual machines that hosted ESX servers, the vCenter server and the Openfiler iSCSI/NFS storage server. The virtual datacenter image can be loaded, on demand, on VCL blade servers. As a result, every student has the opportunity to manage her/his own virtual datacenter and complete hands-on exercises, individually, at any time and from any place. Our virtual datacenter image is different from other typical VCL virtual environments in that Windows/Linux virtual machines are deployed on the virtual machines running ESX servers - a VM-inside-VM solution. VCL provides a scalable, cost-effective solution for students to learn virtualized datacenter skills and cloud computing administration.