The University of Luxembourg was founded in 2003 and is the only public university in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. With more than 7,000 students and approximately 2,400 employees from around the world, the University provides a truly cosmopolitan learning experience. 60% of students are international students, and the majority of staff members and academics have an international background. Its academic areas of focus are digital transformation, medicine and health, and sustainable and societal development.
The Times Higher Education ranks the University of Luxembourg fourth worldwide for international outlook, 25th in the Young University Ranking 2022 and among the top 250 universities worldwide. The university has both local and global impact and is a driving force in a country well on its way to becoming a leading knowledge-based society.
At-a-Glance
The Luxembourg Centre for Educational Testing (LUCET) seeks to determine if Luxembourg schools are achieving their educational goals. This research unit of the University of Luxembourg conducts standardized tests with thousands of students each year to objectively assess key skills, academic performance and teaching quality. The online assessment system for these tests is delivered on a SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) cluster. In conjunction with SUSE Manager and the SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension, LUCET achieves highly efficient, secure and reliable operation of this critical application. SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) Micro not only allows them to deploy edge solutions very efficiently but also provides the capability to roll out the assessment system as a mobile solution in schools.
University of Luxembourg speeds system updates with SUSE Manager
“It is a huge relief for us to be able to use SUSE Manager to centrally manage heterogeneous Linux systems, rather than having to run multiple management solutions in parallel.”
The journey to open source
LUCET was founded to assess and improve the quality of the national education system in Luxembourg. LUCET’s most prominent and resource-intensive project is the Épreuves Standardisées (ÉpStan), a Luxembourg school monitoring program that aims to facilitate evidence-based decision making in national education. Through the ÉpStan, LUCET is not only providing timely and policy-relevant information to national educational stakeholders, but also assembling a unique and incredibly rich database about the evolution of students’ competency profiles and their pathways through school — and possibly through life.
For the implementation of the standardized tests, LUCET developed the online assessment system OASYS in 2010. Over the years, this solution went through several evolutionary stages. The first versions of the online assessment system were hosted on Apple servers, which often required an enormous administrative effort. When Apple discontinued support for Mac OS X Server, LUCET initially switched to Oracle Solaris. However, this operating system was also eventually discontinued by the manufacturer.
The IT team was once again faced with the challenge of finding a suitable system platform to run OASYS. In the meantime, LUCET received a mandate from the Luxembourg Ministry of Education to test up to 12,000 students per year according to standardized procedures, significantly increasing OASYS’s requirements for performance and availability. As a result, the team responsible for the development and deployment of OASYS and the online tests had grown from 11 to 50 people.
“We were looking for an easily scalable platform that could meet the demands of nationwide testing,” says Markus Scherer, infrastructure and architecture engineer at LUCET. “At the same time, we wanted to increase the pace of innovation and enable our developers to take advantage of new technologies as quickly as possible. It became clear that an open source operating system with professional support was the only option for us.”
Why SUSE solutions?
Choosing SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
LUCET’s IT team considered three major Linux distributions as operating systems for OASYS: Debian, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SLES.
“When we evaluated Debian, we found that we needed additional management products to run the solution efficiently. In addition, there was not enough enterprise support available. We wanted to be able to rely on getting support quickly if, for example, we encountered technical problems during the online assessments,” says Scherer.
Red Hat could have provided the level of service that LUCET expected from a software vendor. However, LUCET wanted to avoid being locked into Red Hat’s technologies and ecosystem. For example, the Red Hat Satellite management solution would have allowed the team to manage only Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems. This went against the idea of openness and vendor independence that the university research project was pursuing.
“SUSE, on the other hand, was able to fully meet our requirements,” says Scherer. “In the proof of concept, SLES provided us with all the features we needed. The enterprise support, the high-availability extension and the favorable economic conditions for the education sector were certainly key factors. Last but not least, SUSE Manager also played an important role in the decision.”
Choosing SUSE Manager
With SUSE Manager, SUSE provides a Linux management solution for DevOps and IT teams that supports multiple distributions and system architectures. “The main thing we expected from using SUSE Manager was greater operational efficiency,” says Scherer. “Our focus is clearly on developing the OASYS platform and providing technical support to the research staff. The less time we spend on administrative activities, the more time we have for these tasks.”
In addition, the IT team liked the open concept of SUSE Manager: the platform can manage not only SLES servers, but also systems running all major Linux distributions. For example, using Ubuntu servers for running a key statistical analysis application, the team can manage the Ubuntu servers and SLES servers from a single console. “It is a huge relief for us to be able to use SUSE Manager to centrally manage heterogeneous Linux systems, rather than having to run multiple management solutions in parallel,” says Scherer.
The impact of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Working with local SUSE consultants in Luxembourg and SUSE Gold Partner hupstream, the IT team set up the first high-availability cluster. Once OASYS was up and running, the environment quickly expanded. The cluster, now based on Dell hardware, comprises nine nodes and nearly 80 virtual machines running on the open source KVM hypervisor. A standalone server is equipped with high-performance NVIDIA graphics cards, enabling fast execution of deep learning applications for statistical analysis.
A mirrored storage solution from Huawei supports the high availability of the cluster. In the future, the team will split the cluster and storage systems into two physically separate locations, enabling them to access applications and data in the event of a disaster.
Provides reliable online assessments for thousands of students
“The high availability of OASYS is one of the most important objectives we have to maintain as a team today,” says Scherer. “Even with thousands of students taking their online tests at the same time, our systems can’t go down. Outages or performance fluctuations would potentially skew results and frustrate the teachers and students involved.”
That’s why the LUCET team chose SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension (SLE HA). This flexible, policy-based clustering solution enables the implementation of highly available Linux clusters that virtually eliminate downtime. SLE HA continuously monitors all servers in the cluster for potential errors or failures. If a problem occurs, SLE HA moves the workload from one server to another, or it automatically restarts the application on a healthy system.
“We’re proud to say that we haven’t lost a single bit of data since we deployed the SLES cluster,” says Scherer. “The cluster is also excellent at handling peak loads during testing. Our infrastructure can support up to 25,000 concurrent users without compromising response times.”
The impact of SLE Micro
Flexible deployment from the data center to the edge
In addition to the high level of stability, Scherer appreciates the flexible deployment options of the SUSE Linux platform: “Today, we not only use SLES as the server operating system in the data center, but also SLE Micro for decentralized use cases. Because all SUSE operating system products are built on a common code base, we benefit from consistent security and compliance standards. In addition, the lean and immutable SLE Micro allows us to deploy edge solutions very efficiently.”
Initially, the team wanted to create a mobile test environment. LUCET’s work often involves conducting tests in primary schools that do not yet have the necessary network technology or a fast enough internet connection. For these scenarios, LUCET has developed a mobile testing infrastructure that enables research to be carried out directly in schools and thus be available on site at short notice. The environment includes 40 Apple iPads for test execution, a compact cluster solution based on three Raspberry Pi computers and an integrated access point. SLE Micro powers the mobile cluster and provides users with all the applications and databases they need to run online assessments completely autonomously.
“All our researchers have to do is connect the cluster to the power grid and distribute the endpoints. Then they can start testing immediately as usual,” says Scherer.
The impact of SUSE Manager
Simplifies IT management and reduces troubleshooting effort by 90%
Since the SLES infrastructure went live, not only has the total number of virtual machines grown to about 80, but the IT team has had to continually adapt and evolve the environment. Developers and project teams constantly need new applications for their work, while other workloads can be shut down. In addition, the IT team must keep all system components up to date.
SUSE Manager makes all these tasks very efficient and convenient. “Today, we can provision new virtual machines using templates at the push of a button,” says Scherer. “We also give them the configurations they need for the best possible system performance.” Implementing patches and operating system updates is now largely automated, with no disruption to users.
In addition to many administrative tasks, SUSE Manager also simplifies troubleshooting of the entire infrastructure. “In the past, when we had technical issues after applying patches or updates, we often had to spend a long time troubleshooting,” says Scherer. “Now, we simply look at SUSE Manager’s history to see what changes were made when the problem first occurred. This often allows us to isolate the cause of the problem within 30 minutes and initiate a rollback of the offending software. We often reduce troubleshooting time by more than 90% this way.”
Ensures strong protection of sensitive test results
Using SUSE Manager also improves the security of LUCET’s entire Linux infrastructure. “In the previous environment, it often took us a long time to apply security updates to all of our systems,” says Scherer. “Today, we install new security patches on the day they are released. SUSE Manager notifies us when new updates and patches are available, and it then automatically updates all test systems at the scheduled time.” If no problems occur there, the production systems are also updated.
But SUSE Manager doesn’t just make patch management easier; it also enables the LUCET team to prove that all systems are in compliance with security requirements. In conjunction with the OpenSCAP framework, SUSE Manager provides the ability to verify the security of any Linux system and perform audit scans of the environment. For example, the team can determine the patch status of Linux systems and verify that security settings are properly configured. SUSE Manager also lets them detect potential threats and compliance violations during regular audit scans.
“The data we work with is anonymized but still highly sensitive,” emphasizes Scherer. “Securing the infrastructure is therefore a top priority for our team. This is another area where we benefit from the capabilities of SUSE Manager.”
What’s next for LUCET?
LUCET plans to expand its testing infrastructure for online assessments in the future. It is already considering offering the technology to customers outside the education sector. With the implementation of SUSE Manager and the HA extension for SLES, the technical requirements for a highly available and easily scalable operation are already in place.
As the platform evolves, the LUCET team is also considering containerizing core applications. For example, the OASYS solution for each educational institution could run in its own containers going forward. “We see great potential for our partnership with SUSE in the future,” says Scherer. “The Rancher Prime container management platform could help us take the next step in the development of OASYS — again, 100% open source.”