Apache VCL

The Apache VCL incubator project.

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.

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

User Documentation

• Overview for VCL Users (those doing daily management of a VCL installation)
  • Making a Reservation
  • Image Creation
  • Granting Access to a New Image
  • Example - Granting Two Sets of Users Access to Two Different Sets of Images
  • managegroups.py - Remotely managing user groups
  • The VCL XMLRPC API
• Documentation for VCL Administrators (those doing a VCL installation)
  • VCL Architecture
  • Administrator's FAQ
  • VCL Installation (Current Release)
    • Adding support for partimage and partimage-ng to xCAT 2.x (unofficial)
    • Creating a Base Image
    • Troubleshooting (old)

Community

Interested in joining the community or giving back to open source? There are several ways to assist:

• Join the mailing lists below and discuss ideas.
• Contribute bug-fixes or get involved in development.
  • How to Become a committer
• Help with the documentation, both end-user and installation.
• Help improve the website.

Mailing lists

• User mailing list  user-subscribe@vcl.apache.org
• Development List dev-subscribe@vcl.apache.org

Archives

• Search: http://markmail.org/set/jlmr2rdvup4w2
• User (old): http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-vcl-user
• User (current): http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/vcl-user
• Development (old): http://mail-archives.

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• apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-vcl-dev
• Development (current): http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/vcl-dev

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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.

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VCL Feature

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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 For a conference workshop
• Physical (bare-metal*) provisioning using xCAT
• Virtual machine provisioning on VMware ESXi, VMware 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 environment usage for environments
• Privilege control , through web interface grant  vary - grant varying levels of control to end-users through web interface
  • Image checkout, image creation, manage users, manage resources*, manage resource schedules
• Set available/unavailable schedules for nodes
• Multiple Management Nodes* for scalability
• API support for making requests and provisioning resources.

System Requirements

See the VCL Installation documentation for more information

Web Frontend

• Apache HTTP Server 1.3 or 2.x with SSL enabled (Apache License)
• PHP 5.0 or later (PHP License)
• PHP modules (PHP License):
  • php-gd
  • php-json
  • php-mysql
  • php-openssl
  • php-xml
  • php-xmlrpc
• Dojo Toolkit and 1.6.2 (modified BSD license or the Academic Free License version 2.1)

Database

• MySQL 5.0 or later (GPL)

Management Node Backend

• Operating system - tested on CentOS 5 (GPL), RedHat Advanced Server 4 and 5 (Red Hat), and RedHat Fedora Core 7 and 9 (GPL)
• perl-DBD-MySQL (Artistic and GPL)
• MySQL 5 client (GPL)
• Nmap security scanner (Nmap and GPL)
• OpenSSH client (BSD)
• Perl 5.8.x (Artistic and GPL)
• Perl modules available from CPAN
  • Class-Data-Inheritable (Artistic and GPL)
  • Compress-Raw-Zlib(Artistic and GPL)
  • Crypt-SSLeay (Artistic and GPL)
  • DBI (Artistic and GPL)
  • Devel-StackTrace (Artistic and GPL)
  • Exception-Class (Artistic and GPL)
  • HTML-Parser (Artistic and GPL)
  • IO-Compress (Artistic and GPL)
  • libwww-perl (Artistic and GPL)
  • MailTools (Artistic and GPL)
  • Object-InsideOut (Artistic and GPL)
  • RPC-XML (Artistic and LGPL)
  • XML-Parser (Artistic and GPL)
  • YAML (Artistic and GPL)