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VCL, Virtual Computing Lab. The VCL can be many things, first and foremost it is a open-source system used dynamically provision and broker remote access to a dedicated compute environment for an end-user. These computers are typically housed in a data center , a such as physical blade server , or a virtual machine or . VCL can also broker access to a a standalone machine such as a lab machine on a university campus.

One of the primary goals of VCL is to deliver a dedicated compute environment to a user for a limited time through a web interface. This compute environment can range from something simple as a virtual machine running an productivity software to a machine room blade running high end software (i.e. a CAD, GIS,statistical package or an Enterprise level application) to a cluster of interconnected physical (bare metal) compute nodes.

Also using the scheduling API it can be used to automate the provisioning of servers in a server farm or HPC cluster.

  Project Resources

Conceptual Overview

The conceptual overview below shows that remote users connect to the VCL Scheduling Application (the web VCL portal) and request access to a desired application environment. The application environment consists of an operating system and a suite of applications. The computer types are machine room blade servers, vmware virtual machines, and standalone machines.

 VCL Feature list

• Automated provisioning, on-demand or future based
• Brokers user sessions
• Block allocations - provisioning larger number of compute environments for a specific event
  • For the class room
  • A conference workshop
• Physical (bare-metal*) provisioning using xCAT
• Virtual machine provisioning on VMware ESXi, ESX Standard server, VMware Free Server
• Image creation - allow end-users to create custom environments.
• Image revision control, create multiple revisions of an image.
• Statistics of usage for environments
• Privilege control, through web interface grant  vary levels of control to end-users
  • Image checkout, image creation, manage users, manage resources*, manage resource schedules
• Set available/unavailable schedules for nodes
• Multiple Management Nodes*

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