Implementation of a Remote Mobile Thin-Client Lab ...

AACE E-Learning World Conference 2014

Implementation of a Remote Mobile Thin-Client Lab Solution Incorporating Virtual Machine-based Technologies Charles J. Lesko, Jr., Ph.D., PMP Abstract: This effort describes the background, design, implementation, and early impacts of fielding a remote mobile thin-client lab solution to support online course delivery to remote students. Specifically, the effort focuses on the incorporation of virtual machine-based technologies to provide a flexible operating environment for remote online students to interact in while minimizing the need for a remote technical maintenance footprint and meeting low bandwidth requirements typical of remote computing lab sites.

Introduction At present, the technologies exist that enable students at remote sites to access various computing environments and applications via the Internet in order to either mimic those computing resources typically found in computing labs on campus or to actually access on-campus computing resources via remote applications. While multiple remote access solutions are utilized in industry there is an increasing demand for similar solutions to support remote students taking various academic course deliveries. The availability of a remote computing lab solution has the ability to extend the computer laboratory experience to students who geographically are either distanced from on-campus resources or unable to utilize on campus resources during their online course delivery. Providing this capability ability to remote students is vital to effective learning not only in the areas of engineering and technology but also in any courses or programs that require computing lab resources to meet course outcomes (You, 2013) (Azad, Auer, & Harward, 2011) (Schaffer, et al., 2009). This paper introduces the reader to a remote mobile thin-client lab solution developed to support a broad and varying list of college online courses. The solution architecture, hardware integration, hardware and software interfacing, collaborative toolsets are demonstrated and discussed in the paper.

Background Based on a growing need for remote computer lab resources to support students in both online and blended delivery scenarios (Martin & Woodward, 2013) (Zhang & Li, 2014) (Chandra & Borah, 2012), a grant was secured to test the viability of a remote mobile thin-client lab solution. This effort proposed to reach out to a currently untapped group of U.S. Coast Guardsmen within the region that is currently stationed at remote Boat Stations along the coast. This group of young service members is comprised mostly high school educated, technically-oriented men and women that provide a ready pool of students for various associate and undergraduate technology programs. In discussions with the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG), most of the Guardsmen at these remote boat stations have access to the internet but most lack access to workstations and the network bandwidth at these locations is very limited. Currently, there are efforts in place at the supporting regional Coast Guard Station that oversees these remote boat stations to provide their Guardsmen with some limited educational opportunities through the local Community Colleges. However, at present, only foundational courses such in College English and College Math are available due primarily to a the community college’s lack of technical online delivery and onsite resources and all students must travel to the station to take these courses which is not always an option. Based on a series of discussions with the Community College and the USCG, it was determined that a technical solution might not only enable the community college to reach the more remote service members but also allow for a more robust delivery capability allowing for more technical course offerings in the future. Once realized, the project involved the host University providing technical and pedagogical support to the local community college and its instructors to assist them in delivering more technically based online courses. To alleviate the shortage of computing resources at the boat stations, a thin-client lab solution was designed and fielded to each of the predetermined remote sites.

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AACE E-Learning World Conference 2014 The concept of Remote Mobile Thin-Client Computing Lab was to provide students at remote locations with virtual computing capability. The assumptions for the proposed solution were that the solution should: - Support remote low bandwidth sites; - Provide a minimal cost solution; - Support LOW/NO Onsite Maintenance; - Scalable to support up to (24) end users per site; - Provide multiple Operating System Environments; - Support onsite caching/storage of student content; - Provide both Cloud and No Cloud Access Options. The following outlines some of the key elements to this Remote Mobile Thin-Client solution implementation: Participants – It was anticipated that 12 to 15 Guardsmen (students) from pre-selected USCG boat stations would be enrolled in online various online courses with a focus on more technical course delivery capabilities. Instructors/Facilitators – Faculty and subject-matter experts from the host university and the community colleges would provide course development and facilitation. Key Delivery Technologies and Activities – The technical focus for this project was to center on minimizing roadblocks to delivery of technical courses through the use of: a)

Synchronous versus asynchronous learning environments - Synchronous learning environments support live, two-way oral or visual communications between the instructor and the student facilitating the transfer of knowledge from instructor to the student. An asynchronous learning environment exists when communication between the instructor and the student is not real-time. Examples of asynchronous instruction in a distance learning environment are the use of text materials (print or electronic), and online discussion boards where students respond to questions from the instructor or other students.

b) Incorporation of Social Media - The use of discussion boards, wikis, and blogs are not considered as instructional media delivery options, per se, but instead are viewed as enabling technologies used to support other instructional media in designing a blended learning solution. Often referred to as e-learning 2.0 or Web 2.0, these media components (wikis, blogs, and discussion boards) are primarily used as collaborative tools and not considered stand-alone instructional media delivery options. c)

Virtualized Desktop Presentation – Each participating institution would have the opportunity to familiarize participants with the host university’s existing virtualization capabilities and provide their thoughts on knowledge use as a Technical course delivery media.

d) Delivery length and timeframe – This effort was planned for single academic year. The course development and solution deployment were conducted in the fall and the first courses delivered implementing the remote lab solution began in the spring semester.

Thin-Clients and Virtual Machines The key to the design of the technical solution centered on the integration of virtual machine-based technologies in concert with the use of thin-client labs. The concept of thin-client computing has been around for decades. In the late 1970s, the concept of a “dumb terminal” or a computer minus storage or a hard drive was being used as an access point to interact with more robust centralized computing and storage assets. In most cases, a dumb terminal was simply an output device or display monitor that had no computational power to do anything besides display, send and receive data. These dumb terminals are similar in concept to what is now referred to a "thin-client" where most of the processing is done from separate computing resources (such as the cloud) that the client is connected to (Kim, Jung, & Chung, 2013) (Umezawa, Miyake, & Goto, 2013).

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AACE E-Learning World Conference 2014

Current implementations of thin-client computing have advanced dramatically in recent years with many solutions rivalling traditional PC's in capability, accessibility, and performance. In many respects, thin-client computing has advanced to a point where end-users are unable to distinguish the difference between a thin device and a PC (Mitwicki, Sikora, & Danek, 2013) (Hung, Hossain, Islam, & Morales, 2013). Virtual computing is essentially taking one computer and making into many virtual computers or "virtual machines". A virtual machine or VM is for all intents and purposes a software implementation of an encapsulated computing environment in which a given operating system or other application can be installed and executed. The VM basically emulates a physical computing environment. It is the overarching virtualization application solution that manages any VM requests for CPU, memory, hard disk, network and other hardware resources. Although the term VM can take on different meanings depending on the context, for the purposes of this article a VM applies to those virtualization technologies that create independent environments for use by distinct operating systems and other applications that are designed to run directly on various client or server hardware solutions (Burd, Gaillard, Rooney, & Seazzu, 2011) (Burd, Gaillard, Rooney, & Seazzu, 2011) (Shiraz & Gani, 2012).

Solution Design and Implementation Based on the assumptions for the proposed solution that where outlined earlier, a scalable solution was developed to support two or more remote USCG Boat Station sites (see Figure 1). These remote sites characteristically have minimal bandwidth to the cloud and on occasion, that cloud access can be lost. To minimize the throughput and to better support the thin-clients locally, as well as support the thin-clients when cloud access is lost, a VMWare server was placed at each site along with (12) thin-clients.

Figure 1: Remote Mobile Thin-Client Lab Site Distribution

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AACE E-Learning World Conference 2014

The VMWare server was able to meet the need to (Wang, Hembroff, & Yedica, 2010): - Support remote low bandwidth sites; - Scalable to support up to (24) end users per site; - Provide multiple Operating System Environments; - Support onsite caching/storage of student content; - Provide both Cloud and No Cloud Access Options. The selected thin-clients enabled the remote lab solution to: - Provide a minimal cost solution; - Support LOW/NO Onsite Maintenance; The institutional partnerships established for this effort are outlined in Figure 1 with the Host University providing and monitoring the status of the remote mobile thin-client labs at each site. The Host University is also responsible for establishing management of the Chromebook Thin-Clients via Chrome Management Console, and creation of the various VM views needed for each course delivery. The local Community College is responsible for providing trained faculty, course content and delivery in both online and blended environments, and daily management of Chrome Management Console. Two remote USCG Boat Station sites were selected for this initial field of the remote lab solution with each station having up to (12) service members available for any given course offering. The implementation of VM technologies provides numerous advantages over the installation of singular operating environments and software application that are applied directly to the physical hardware. VM technologies allow for a singular robust hardware solution (server) to emulate multiple operating environments at once. So to provide the thin-clients at each site with individual VM access capabilities, a mobile lab VM server was placed at each site. To meet the needs of up to (24) thin-clients robust servers with (64GB) of memory; RAID5 capability with (3TB) of storage; built in redundant power supplies, and uninterruptable power supplies (UPS) were procured. The basic architecture for each Mobile Lab VM server is outlined in Figure 2. At the lowest layer, the server hardware is supported utilizing VMWare’s vSphere and vCenter management appliance; on top of that are View Composer and Connections Manager. Ericom Secure Gateway provides the HTML5 RDP client access to the thin clients. Finally, the higher levels seen on Figure 2 indicate several VM’s that house various services including Active Directory Service, File Storage Service, Moodle’s Learning Management Solution Service (Rice, 2011), as well as, the multiple client VM’s providing the various operating environments for the students. Although this solution can support many none technical course deliveries, it has been designed to meet the growing need for technical course offerings that demand more hands-on laboratory type experiments in undergraduate education; such as information technology, computer security, networking, and system administration. The Host University is responsible for creating any unique VM’s required for a given course offering. The VM’s are created offsite and remotely pushed to each of the site VM servers since each course offering can have differing requirements. By implementing the VM Server locally, it is able to meet the various course and lab needs of the remote students without placing a demand on the limited network bandwidth to the cloud. Prior to any course offering, the community college instructor articulates any operating system environment requirements such as Windows or UNIX and indicates what applications and/or files need to be available to their students for the course. Those applications are loaded into a course VM that is then pushed to the Lab VM server for student access. Thin-Client Selection - There were several thin-clients considered prior to procurement. A variant of the Google Chromebook was selected for several reasons to meet the solution needs. As a thin-client, a Chromebook is more akin to an Internet-dependent laptop (Rome, 2013). The final selection was based on several factors: first, the Chromebook’s price-point was very competitive; secondly, the Chromebook’s automated online updating made it a good fit for the ‘low-to-no’ onsite maintenance requirement; and finally, it’s built in Chrome operating system with readily available applications gave the added benefit of having a thin-client with minimal application and offline

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AACE E-Learning World Conference 2014 functionality. Connectivity to the cloud and the VM server are provided via Wi-Fi provided by a local wireless router. The built-in Chrome browser provides HTML5 support allowing the students to access their class VM’s via the ERICOM Secure Gateway loaded on the VM Server (see Figure 2). The flexibility of having access to multiple VM’s provides faculty with more options for online instruction. Specific applications can be made available to students remotely; multiple operating system environments can be made available for more complex, technically oriented course work; and all of this is provided locally to the students via the VM server with virtually no cloud bandwidth usage.

Figure 2: Mobile Lab VM Server Configuration Challenges to Implementation Aside from the many issues faced designing and developing the solution, there were several other challenges faced in this effort, most of which centered on the incorporation of this new technology into the course delivery. The initial spring course offerings were limited to non-technical courses that had already been pre-scheduled prior to fielding of the solution. The faculty tasked with those non-technical courses had already tailored their courses to meet the minimal student technical capability available in previous semesters so the use of complex VM’s was not utilized for the first semester. However, more technically oriented classes are being planned for the coming semesters and discussions are currently ongoing to work with the faculty of those courses to evaluate their delivery methodologies approaches to see where their offerings might be improved. Currently, the community college fielding the courses uses Moodle as its online learning management solution; however, the college outsources its Moodle services so system access is limited. The site VM Servers have the capability to cache Moodle content to further minimize bandwidth usage at the sites but that is not an option at

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AACE E-Learning World Conference 2014 present with the existing managed service provider. To work around this issue, the community college has class module import and export capabilities with its Moodle solution. Courses with heavy bandwidth content such as videos, and large images on the Moodle site are flagged and the content is uploaded to the site VM servers for students to access, thus reducing the need for students to pull that content through the cloud. Initial Impacts of Deployment The key high-level objectives of this effort have been: the enhancement of the quality of undergraduate technology education within the region, specifically with the remote service members from the USCG; and the building of a stronger partnership with the USCG and local Community Colleges by encouraging knowledge and research sharing between the partnering institutions. Other more specific benefits realized have been that the Host University has had an opportunity to share its knowledge, skill and resource with various regional institutions and used this effort to provide a vehicle for possibly gaining new students into its technology programs. For the USCG within the region, it has provided service members with an opportunity to access educational opportunities in more technically oriented fields that were not otherwise available to them. And finally, for the local community college, it has provided them with an opportunity to not only increase their student enrollments but also provided their faculty with additional technical resources that they would not normally have had available to them. This effort has also introduced new online delivery concepts, approaches and methods that have spurred participants to further investigate online delivery opportunities on their own, and it has also demonstrated and encouraged the practice of these approaches and methods to provide course delivery to remote students. Finally, it is anticipated that these added remote lab capabilities will be used to attract qualified students to pursue study in more technically oriented programs. The added availablity of online resources should directly improve student access to limited technical resources and the virtual lab solution should provide new virtualized capabilities for delivering course content in the future.

References

Azad, A. K., Auer, M. E., & Harward, V. J. (2011). Internet Accessible Remote Laboratories: Scalable ELearning Tools for Engineering and Science Disciplines. Hershey, PA: IGI Global. Burd, S., Gaillard, G., Rooney, E., & Seazzu, A. (2011). Virtual Computing Laboratories Using VMware Lab Manager. 2011 44th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS). Manoa, HI. Chandra, D. G., & Borah, M. D. (2012). Cost benefit analysis of cloud computing in education. 2012 International Conference on Computing, Communication and Applications (ICCCA). Dindigul, Tamilnadu, India. Hung, P. P., Hossain, A. A., Islam, M., & Morales, M. A. (2013). An Innovative Proposal for Data Distribution Optimization in Cloud Computing. 2013 International Conference on Information Science and Applications (ICISA). Pattaya, Thailand. Kim, N.-U., Jung, S.-M., & Chung, T.-M. (2013). A Remote Control Architecture for Thin-Client in Mobile Cloud Computing. 2013 International Conference on Information Science and Applications (ICISA). Pattaya, Thailand. Martin, N. L., & Woodward, B. (2013). Building a Cybersecurity Workforce with Remote Labs . Information Systems Education Journal , 11(3), 57-62.

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AACE E-Learning World Conference 2014 Mitwicki, R., Sikora, T., & Danek, T. (2013). The Use of Virtualization and Thin Clients Within the Infrastructure of Computer Labs. Emerging Trends in Computing, Informatics, Systems Sciences, and Engineering, 151, 455-461. Rice, W. (2011). Moodle 2.0 E-Learning Course Development. Birmingham, UK: Packt Publishing. Rome, C. H. (2013). The Chrome Book: The Essential Guide to Cloud Computing with Google Chrome and the Chromebook. United Kingdom: LOTONtech. Schaffer, H. E., Averitt, S. F., Hoit, M. I., Peeler, A., Sills, E. D., & Vouk, M. A. (2009). NCSU's Virtual Computing Lab: A Cloud Computing Solution. Computer, Vol. 42, Iss. 7, 94-97. Shiraz, M., & Gani, A. (2012). Mobile Cloud Computing: Critical Analysis of Application Deployment in Virtual Machines. International Proceedings of Computer Science & Information Technology , 27, 11-16. Umezawa, K., Miyake, T., & Goto, H. (2013). Development and Evaluation of a Virtual PC Type Thin Client System. Data Management in Cloud, Grid and P2P Systems , 8059, 111-123. Wang, X., Hembroff, G. C., & Yedica, R. (2010). Using VMware VCenter lab manager in undergraduate education for system administration and network security. Proceedings of the 2010 ACM conference on Information technology education . Midland, MI. You, Y. (2013). A LabVIEW-Based Remote Laboratory: Architecture and Implementation. Hershey, PA: IGI Global. Zhang, D., & Li, Y. (2014). Improving Student Learning in Computer Science Courses by Using Virtual OpenCL Laboratory. 2014 International Conference on Management, Education and Social Science (ICMESS 2014). Shanghai (Kunshan), China.

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