The management of Linux virtual lab by dual load-balancing

Adopting GNU/Linux as the Desktop Operating System is an irreversible trend. To enhance the teaching effectiveness, it is the foremost priority to improve the Linux system management course by offering each student a dedicated Linux machine. However, the concept is impractical to implement due to the huge hardware and maintenance costs. Meanwhile, both multiple-core and virtualization technology are the main design trends of CPU manufacturers. The computation powers provided by commercial off-the-shelf computers are far beyond the need of front-edge or internal servers. As a consequence, the valuable computing resources such as CPU, memory, and disk space, are mostly idle and wasted. In this paper, we combine the technologies of virtualization and load-balancing to establish the virtual Linux lab in computer cluster built by using the Linux virtual server cluster management software. To balance the system load of real hosts and maintain the performance of Kernel-based virtual machine (KVM), we use the Round-robin load-balancing protocol in the KVM startup time and the Formal-concept-analysis-based load-balancing protocol developed by us during the execution of KVM. Furthermore, to facilitate the management of KVMs, we will develop a web-based scalable and distributive virtualization tool to deploy KVM in terms of the VCluster.xml file.