I'm currently in charge of 2 really big servers (128GB Ram & 32 8-code Xeon CPU each) at my university running Ubuntu 12.04. Students are suppose to use them for big data analysis. We want every user to be able to use all resources, however, things is getting a bit messy. Users can install whatever they like at their home directories (e.g. Tomcat) but they're starting to complain about issues like ports being taken by others.

Someone suggested we do some sort of virtualization (e.g. LXC) and give users access to containers. Other say we do somthing like AWS and make users create the resources they need for their work.

Any suggestions?