Tag: virtual labs

Virtual Labs presentation at the HubLinked meeting in Dublin

We have participated to the HubLinked workshop in Dublin this week, where I delivered a presentation on some of our efforts on Virtual Labs, in the hope that this could be useful to the partners designing the “Global Labs” where students will experiment together for Software Engineering projects.

In this presentation (PDF) I introduced our partners to the Labtainers and Antidote Open Source projects, which are quite promising for designing “virtual labs” using VMs and/or containers.

Thomas and I have recorded the speech, and I’ve used obs and kdenlive to edit the recording.

Here’s the results (unfortunately, the sound is of low quality):

Feel free to comment, ask, etc.

Running networking labs over Kubernetes with Antidote

I’ve just come across Antidote a recent project that intends at running networking-oriented labs over Kubernetes. It is developped by members of the Network Reliability Engineering community (Juniper-related, AFAIU), to power the NRE Labs platform.

It looks very similar to other platforms that allow you to run labs remotely in consoles opened on cloud machines, alongside lab instructions.

I find it interesting as the code is published under FLOSS license (Apache), and seems to be runable over any Kubernetes installation: you can test it with Minikube through the selfmedicate repo.

Antidote demo running virtual labs in Kubernetes with selfmedicate/minikube, running locally from Olivier Berger on Vimeo.

Internally, it uses Guacamole to provide the Web consoles connected via SSH to the hosts (or emulated devices) running on the k8s cluster. Each learner will get her own k8s namespace running the corresponding PODs.

In principle, it’s rather easy to package any app that can be used from the CLI to run it over Antidote.

The main drawback I’ve found so far, wrt our experiments with virtual labs, is the limitation to SSH access for a CLI: the Guacamole setup doesn’t provide access to VNC, AFAICS (yet).

Quite interesting and promising project anyway.

Virtualized lab demonstration using a tweaked Labtainers running in a container

I’ve recorded a screencast: Labtainers in docker demonstration (embedded below) demonstrating how I’ve tweaked Labtainers so as to run it inside its own Docker container.

I’m currently very much excited by the Labtainers framework for delivering virtual labs, for instance in the context of MOOCs.

Labtainers is quite interesting as it allows isolating a lab in several containers running in their own dedicated virtual network, which helps distributing a lab without needing to install anything locally.

My tweak allows to run what I called the “master” container which contains the labtainers scripts, instead of having to install labtainers on a Linux host. This should help installation and distribution of labtainers, as well as deploying it on cloud platforms, some day soon. In the meantime Labtainer containers of the labs run with privileges so it’s advised to be careful, and running the whole of these containers in a VM may be safer. Maybe Labtainers will evolve in the future to integrate a containerization of its scripts. My patches are pending, but the upstream authors are currently focused on some other priorities.

Another interesting property of labtainers that is shown in the demo is the auto-grading feature that uses traces of what was performed inside the lab environment by the student, to evaluate the activities. Here, the telnetlab that I’ve shown, is evaluated by looking at text input on the command line or messages appearing on the stdout or in logs : the student launched both telnet or ssh, some failed login appeared, etc.

However, the demo is a bit confusing, in that I recorded a second lab execution whereas I had previously attempted a first try at the same telnetlab. In labtainers, traces of execution can accumulate : the student wil make a first attempt, and restart later, before sending it all to the professor (unless a redo.py is issued). This explanes that the  grading appears to give a different result than what I performed in the screencast.

Stay tuned for more news about my Labtainers adventures.

P.S. thanks to labtainers authors, and obs-studio folks for the screencast recording tool 🙂

A review of Virtual Labs virtualization solutions for MOOCs

I’ve just uploaded a new memo A review of Virtual Labs virtualization solutions for MOOCs in the form of a page on my blog, before I eventually publish something more elaborated (and valuated by peer review).

The subtitle is “From Virtual Machines running locally or on IaaS, to containers on a PaaS, up to hypothetical ports of tools to WebAssembly for serverless execution in the Web browser”

Excerpt from the intro :

In this memo, we try to draw an overview of some benefits and concerns with existing approaches at using virtualization techniques for running Virtual Labs, as distributions of tools made available for distant learners.

We describe 3 main technical architectures: (1) running Virtual Machine images locally on a virtual machine manager, or (2) displaying the remote execution of similar virtual machines on a IaaS cloud, and (3) the potential of connecting to the remote execution of minimized containers on a remote PaaS cloud.

We then elaborate on some perspectives for locally running ports of applications to the WebAssembly virtual machine of the modern Web browsers.

I hope this will be of some interest for some.

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