A Preliminary Investigation of Container-Based Virtualization in Information Technology Education

Delivery of an Information Technology curriculum involves utilization of a variety of technologies. Currently hypervisor-based virtualization is widely adopted in classroom and laboratory, satisfying the needs of instructional delivery in Information Technology education. However, it brings new challenges in setting up, and executing on resource-limited hardware. Coupled with this is our situation of shared laboratory computers which have many computationally intensive software applications. To address the issues, we conducted a preliminary investigation of container-based virtualization for use in classroom and laboratory. Our study did discover advantages and limitations of using such an emerging new technology. Although the container-based virtualization does provide many benefits, our observation suggests that at the current stage, it is more appropriate to have a mixture of hypervisor-based and container-based virtualization in Information Technology education.