used today. 2 Users are no longer tied to
a particular locale or limited by a particular workstation environment, and
organizations are no longer limited to
applications that use platforms commensurate with the expertise of their
IT-support staffs. For example, professors who need applications to run on
Linux need not be concerned if their
universities’ IT staffs include all authorized Linux administrators. Virtualization allows operating environments to
be simulated in a way that does not require in-house expertise in the environment being used. 5 What is required are
key insights
though virtualization is not new, the VCL
provides greater access to computer
applications.
the VCL is a sophisticated application
that may be prohibitively expensive
to install from scratch; nCCu is thus
leveraging nC State’s expertise to
develop a VCL project of its own.
Virtualization has great potential on
mainframes, and the nCCu VCL pilot
system aims to extend itself to a
mainframe platform.
the VCL can be deployed by institutions
of any size.
users who know the applications they’ll
be using and their proper configurations. The VCL project at NC State is
a large-scale, publicly accessible example of a virtualization application
in education, 1 providing transparent
access to dozens of applications used
by students and their professors in virtually every discipline in the university.
It has dramatically altered the way students and faculty access the school’s
computer resources.
Founded in 1910, NCCU today has
an enrollment of approximately 8,500
students. As a liberal arts school with a
science focus, it includes the Biomanu-facturing Research Institute and Technology Enterprise and the Biomedical
and Biotechnology Research Institute
and so has an ongoing need to manage
diverse computing environments to
support their various research projects.
The VCL project represented a good
model for addressing NCCU computing needs.
We attended a fall 2004 technology
conference in Research Triangle Park,
NC, where virtualization was covered.
Researchers from NC State and Duke
University described a project that al-
lowed an infrastructure built on a Li-
nux, Apache, PHP, MySQL (or LAMP)
software base installed on blade servers
to host multiple research projects on
different platforms. For example, if one
faculty member had a project requiring
a Windows-based server and another
had a project requiring a Solaris-based
server, both projects could be hosted
on the same infrastructure through
virtualization of the respective operat-
ing systems. While not newcomers to
virtualization, we were nonetheless im-
pressed by how blade servers added a
higher level of scalability. We began to
seek out relationships with researchers
and major technology companies in
the Research Triangle Park area to de-
termine how NCCU might get involved
in the flow of this innovation.
