The purpose of the Xen Worlds project is to allow for the simple creation and administration of arbitrary networks of virtual machines, (called a Xen World), that can be utilized in education and research. Xen Worlds also aims to reduce overhead expenditures as much as possible, so the project must also run on low-end hardware, utilize only open source software and not require extensive administrator support.
The Xen Worlds project was motivated by the limitations and difficulties inherent in providing advanced lab assignments. Courses in Information Assurance, Operating Systems and Networking often require root access to access the relevant system settings and functionality. However, giving root access in a normal lab environment raises many security and privacy problems for the students in the class, and for other students that may utilize the lab.
The virtualization approach to this problem has numerous benefits. It eliminates the need to access a physical lab, allowing on-campus and off-campus students to utilize the same environment. It also allows instructors to provide students with root access to their own personal VMs that are sandboxed to separate them from other Xen Worlds, and the outside world, eliminating associated security and privacy risks. The elimination of the physical lab also reduces administration overhead by eliminating scheduling lab sessions, and provides students greater flexibility in scheduling other classes.
Xen Worlds has been in use for several years at Iowa State, growing from a single desktop PC providing 30 virtual machines, to a cluster of 5 Dell PowerEdge servers, capable of providing almost 500 virtual machines in support of over 120 students in graduate and undergraduate classes.
Both on-campus and off-campus students access the environment utilizing SSH, and allows students to "turn in" a VM, or their entire Xen World for grading - instead of grading configuration files, programs or outputs.
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
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