| VCL 2.4.2 |
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| I. Intro and Description |
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| VCL, Virtual Computing Lab. The VCL can be many things, first and foremost it is |
| an open-source system used to dynamically provision and broker remote access to |
| a dedicated compute environment for an end-user. The provisioned computers are |
| typically housed in a data center and may be physical blade servers, traditional |
| rack mounted servers, or virtual machines. VCL can also broker access to |
| standalone machines such as a lab computers on a university campus. |
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| 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 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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| Also using the scheduling API it can be used to automate the provisioning of |
| servers in a server farm or HPC cluster. |
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| II. Notable Changes |
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| The following are some notable changes from previous releases. |
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| Added: |
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| * Scripted installation and upgrade |
| * Ability to run multiple web servers |
| * NAT support for connecting to reservations |
| * Provisioning to OpenStack |
| * Provisioning to OpenNebula |
| * Provisioning to ESXi 5.5 |
| * Windows 8.x and Server 2012 images |
| * Use of 64 bit cygwin |
| * Improved interface for resource management |
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| Removed: |
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| * xCAT 1.x no longer supported |
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| NOTE: The release process for 2.4 and 2.4.1 was completed, but bugs were found |
| before they were ever announced. So, there never were 2.4 and 2.4.1 releases |
| worth using. 2.4.2 was the first usable release of the 2.4 series. |
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| III. Getting Involved in the ASF VCL Community |
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| There are five ways to become involved in the ASF VCL community. |
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| * Join the mailing lists and participate in discussion |
| There are two mailing lists: user@vcl.apache.org and dev@vcl.apache.org. |
| To join user, send an empty message to user-subscribe@vcl.apache.org. |
| To join dev, send an empty message to dev-subscribe@vcl.apache.org. |
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| * Submit bug reports and feature requests to our JIRA bug tracking system. |
| See section IV below for more information on doing this. |
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| * Create documentation on our Confluence site. Create an account at |
| http://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/VCL/Index and just start adding |
| content. (Note to current community: We should create a page explaining |
| the layout so new people will know where to add content better.) |
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| * Submit patches through the dev mailing list and via the JIRA bug |
| tracking system. Once you have become familiar with VCL, you can begin |
| assisting with the development of it by picking a JIRA issue to fix or by |
| adding a feature needed at your site. Then, contribute a patch of your |
| changes through the JIRA tracking system and send a message to the dev |
| list explaining what you have done. |
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| * Become an official committer to the project. Once you have shown that you have |
| a good grasp of the project by submitting patches, you can further join the |
| development work by submitting a contributor license agreement (CLA) to ASF |
| and having a committer account created to directly contribute code to the |
| project. |
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| * If you are interested in contributing something to the project, please discuss |
| it on the dev list BEFORE starting work on it. This allows the community |
| to be involved in decisions and allows current developers to provide some |
| guidance. |
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| IV. How to Submit Bugs and Feature Requests |
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| If you find a bug, please submit a bug report to our JIRA bug tracking system at |
| http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/VCL (you will need to set up an account |
| there if you haven't already done so - it's free to anyone). |
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| If you would like to requrest a new feature, you can also submit that in the |
| same way through JIRA (just select "New Feature" or "Improvement" as the Issue |
| Type). |
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| After you have created a JIRA issue, you have the option to vote on it to help |
| us know how to prioritize issues. You can also "watch" the issue to see when |
| activity related to it is submitted. |