Design And Implementation Of The Scheduling And Accessing System Of A Virtual Classroom

In the traditional allocation and use of the educational resources, due to differentexperimental courses need different desktop environment, schools often have to providedifferent PC desktops. With the expansion of the size of the desktops, upgrade andmaintenance of the hardware and software, and distribution of the applications on thesedesktops will become very difficult.In order to solve these problems, this paper proposes a cloud-based virtual classroomsolution. In this solution, when the administrator creates different virtual machine imagesin the cloud, the virtual classroom will be able to create different virtual desktopsaccording to these images, so as to provide different desktop environment. Because alldesktop data are stored in the cloud, so the upgrade of the hardware and software, and thedistribution of the applications will become quite simple and easy.The virtual classroom solution in this paper mainly includes two important parts: thescheduling system and the accessing system. Scheduling system is the key part of thevirtual classroom, which includes desktop scheduling and course scheduling, achieving thecourse desktops’ automatic allocation and recycle. Accessing system is the only way forend-users to access the virtual classroom, which includes client and server agent, achievingthe cloud desktops’ remote access.This paper mainly includes two contributions: Firstly, in the scheduling system, thispaper implements the virtual desktops’ lifecycle management on the open sourceOpenStack cloud platform, achieving the goal of course desktops’ dynamic allocation andrecycle. Secondly, in the accessing system, this paper achieves the goal of cross-platform remote desktop access on the basis of FreeRDP, which is an open source implementation ofRDP.Currently, this system has been rigorously tested and successfully deployed in theExperimental Center of our University. In the process of actual use, this system not onlyprovided customized desktop environment for different courses, but also significantlysaved the educational resources, making a good user feedback.