pVEE: A Personalized Virtualized Experimentation Environment for Education Based on Virtual Machines

With the development of teaching method in higher education, traditional computer labs cannot meet the needs and expectations of modern curriculum. This paper proposes a personalized virtualized experimentation environment (pVEE) which aims to provide VMs for the students as curriculum-oriented specialized experimentation environments. We layer virtualization technology (KVM/Xen) on hosts in the computer lab and implement management tools to construct the pVEE system. pVEE allows a teacher to customize a course related base image which contains dedicated operating systems and applications. A student's personalized VM boots from the course specific base image combined with a private virtual disk image including his personalized applications and user data. pVEE supports VM accesses and uses for users inside and outside of the lab. We implement interfaces for users to access the pVEE services. pVEE has been deployed in Peking University to support the course projects of a system virtualization courses. Finally, surveys of pVEE users show that pVEE can meet students' demands for personalized experimentation environments with high resource utilization ratio and manageability.