Performance evaluation and energy consumption of a virtual learning environment on private clouds

Abstract

Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) are increasingly present in educational institutions and represents a new resource that is able to improve the communication between students and teachers. Although these systems are not new, few studies are available for the integrated evaluation of their performance and energy consumption. Assessing the relationship between the performance and energy consumption of VLEs is essential to solving issues both in the implementation phase of a new project and in the expansion or updating of a previous existing infrastructure. Therefore, this work aims to evaluate the performance as well as the energy consumption of the MOODLE environment, a platform that supports VLEs, through two private cloud systems, Apache CloudStack and OpenStack. A methodology is proposed to allow one to conduct such experiments through measurements. A case study illustrates the applicability of the proposed methodology, assuming the Moodle configured on both Apache CloudStack and OpenStack. The results revealed the performance, and also the energy consumption, are different between the two systems, where OpenStack showed a higher energy consumption when compared to Apache CloudStack due to its higher demands on response time.