Design and implementation of private cloud for higher education using OpenStack

Abstract

Higher Education Institutions requires ready to access dedicated devices and various operating systems to assist in teaching, learning various courses. Due to the high cost of hardware, providing physical devices in ever changing IT field is neither economical nor feasible. A higher education IT course may demand specific software running on the specific operating system at particular hardware configuration. Different operating systems requirement and their complex installation and maintenance process poses difficulty to manage them. OpenStack can address both issues by providing IaaS for hardware resources and standard mechanism to manage and distribute course specific VMs. This paper provides design of private cloud for higher education and proof-of-concept implementation methodology for OpenStack platform. Furthermore, to facilitate the construction of the private cloud, the resource requirement model is formulated by which the requirement of physical resources can be measured for a specific number of virtual machines.