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

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• 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 For 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*
• API support for making requests and provisioning resources.