The purpose of the Xen Worlds project is to provide a versatile "virtual lab" where entire networks of virtual machines, called a Xen World, can be provided for use in education and research. Xen Worlds utilizes open source software, including the Xen virtual machine monitor, Fedora Linux, Pdmenu and the Xen Worlds middleware, which is licensed under the GPL.
Xen Worlds has been used to provide on-campus and distance students 24/7 access to their Xen World via SSH, and has allowed students to turn in their virtual machine (VM), or entire Xen World, as the completed project, instead of grading select artifacts such as configuration files, programs or outputs.
The original purpose for the Xen Worlds project was for use in an educational role. Courses in Information Assurance, Operating Systems and Networking often require root access to access the desired system settings. Giving root access in a normal lab environment raises many security and privacy problems and need to be addressed. Past efforts have handled these security issues by having labs and hardware dedicated to a specific course, having each machine reinstall the operating system after use, or using virtualization software, such as VMware or User-mode Linux (UML), to provide a virtual machine. However, there are no existing approaches that address the issues of scalability, usability (for both on-campus and distance education students) and security, while also addressing all of the requirements in all phases of the assignment life-cycle from design to grading. In addition, Xen Worlds reduces the resources required to handle large classes as a single desktop PC, (P4 - 3.0GHz w/2GB of RAM), can provide 30 virtual machines.
Currently, there is an effort to utilize Xen Worlds in the research role by using Xen Worlds in testbeds and other research environments. More information can be found on the documentation page.
Xen Worlds uses only open source software that is licensed under the GPL. The software used includes:
Dr. Tom Daniels, Director: daniels@iastate.edu
Benjamin Anderson, Project Manager/Lead Developer: hawklan@iastate.edu
Shantanu Gattani, Developer: shanu@iastate.edu
Su Chang, changs@iastate.edu
Vic Vijayakumar, vic@iastate.edu
Grant Brinkmeyer, brinkg@iastate.edu
Jamin Hitchcock, jaminh@iastate.edu
The members of the Xen Worlds project would like to thank the Iowa State University Information Assurance Center, Dr. Doug Jacobson, and the ISEAGE project for providing the hardware used to build the Xen Worlds cluster.
If you have any question regarding the Xen Worlds Project please email Benjamin Anderson at: hawklan@iastate.edu