Submitted by Verma Sameer on Tue, 12/31/2013 - 15:49
A year ago, we had two students who worked on an OpenStack project to explore the concept of a private cloud. This experience was meant to serve as a learning experience for the students and for us to explore further work in this space. How can we introduce concepts of virtualization and cloud computing into our curriculum?
We have continued this project into its second phase with two other students. Suraj Samson and Gary Longoria worked on a multi-machine private stack powered by OpenStack. They used three servers to build a functional private cloud. Their experience was interesting, to say the least! As their instructor, I found pulling myself away from their struggles (it's their learning experience after all), but it was well worth the effort. In the long run, they came away a lot more appreciative of the technology and most importantly, with a better understanding of it. Some of their struggles were simply because we had 2005 era hand-me-down Sunfire X64 machines! These didn't support KVM, so we had to default to QEMU.
Thanks again to The Commons Initiative advisory board member Stefano Maffulli (Community Manager, the Openstack Foundation) to continue to encourage us in the right direction. Suraj and Gary's report and slides are attached (CC licensed).
We hope to continue to expand this project in 2014, so our students can learn more. All we need are a bunch of somewhat new(er) machines. Machines that can do KVM, so we don't have to go back to QEMU.
Any of you out there, who want to give away a few servers, ping me! sverma@sfsu.edu