For some time, it is very common for students to develop applications in network, distributed, or on mobile devices. These systems are usually based on a front-end application and a back-end system with business logic. Until now, the Faculty did not have an environment that allowed to practice in these environments.
The "virtech" service is an on-demand virtual machine virtualisation environment. This service allows you to create, configure, modify and delete Linux virtual servers to a group of students. Each group can configure these servers according to their needs and adapt them to develop their practices. In this way students have a (or several) own servers in the "cloud" where they can program any service with the advantage that this service is available from all over the internet.
The management software for this service is OpenNebula and is accessible through the web https://virtech.fib.upc.edu.
OpenNebula is free software that allows us to offer a virtualization system with a simple and personalized user front-end. OpenNebula can be integrated with the most common virtualization systems today like: vmware, KVM, Xen, etc. Our installation is currently based on KVM on multiple virtualization hosts.The virtech platform allows us to offer the service through templates adjusted to each group of users or subjects. In addition, we can define quotas, remote console, network management and integrated DNS, assigning passwords when creating the machine, etc.
Although we currently only provide students with Linux images with Ubuntu distribution, this environment allows you to deploy any system, Linux or Windows, or integrate directly with dockers environments.