Virtual Hosting

For more details, see the Research Computing guide in the Information & Services section

Requesting resources

In most cases, virtual machines or other resources will only be provisioned by request from an iSchool faculty member
The faculty member must agree to be assigned "ownership" of the resource, i.e. they will be the primary point of contact and are responsible for making decisions regarding long-term maintenance and the lifecycle of the system
Students' requests for resources (those which are not backed by faculty and/or funded research projects) will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis and will be granted only in cases where the needs cannot be met by an existing technology resource

Custom Virtual Machines

iSchool Tech Services will provision the virtual machine for you, and will be responsible for the infrastructure (networking, storage, patching, VM snapshot backup/restoration)
Users are primarily responsible for the installation and maintenance of custom applications. Tech services will provide support on a "best-effort" basis.
Security updates will be applied regularly, which may require a reboot of the server or services. If your server needs to maintain constant uptime, reach out to Tech Services for more options.
Systems/services exposed on the public network are subject to routine vulnerability scans; users are expected to mitigate any detected vulnerabilities in their custom applications.
If any security issue cannot be directly addressed (i.e. patched, vulnerable service disabled) the system must be moved onto an isolated network and accessed:
- On a university "device tunnel" VPN (staff/faculty university-managed devices)
- Remotely, through a two-factor-protected "jump server" (RDS)
- From a university research lab system (10.230.84.0/24)
By default, VM's are hosted on an internal, private network. Services are exposed to the internet as needed via Nginx reverse proxy
Custom domain names and SSL certificates can be provided by Tech Services upon request
It should also be noted that the environment hosting the Virtual Machines is not highly-available. There will be occasional outages for maintenance and upgrades. Also, if there is an outage to the main SU environment, the research computing environment will be shut down and resources will be made available for the main SU environment. If your server or application requires constant uptime, please reach out to technology services to coordinate a plan.

Virtual Machine administration

Virtual Machines are managed within the same framework as workstations, see: Computer and device management policy