| VCL 2.1 |
| |
| 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. |
| |
| 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. |
| |
| 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. VCL Roadmap |
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| VCL 2.1 (this release) |
| * completed modularization of vcld |
| * xCAT 2.1 support |
| * Shibboleth authentication |
| * VMWare management via VMWare toolkit |
| * ESXi with thin provisioning on a NetApp |
| |
| VCL 2.2 |
| * power management |
| * support for xCAT 2.2 |
| * improve cluster reservations |
| * improve block reservations |
| |
| VCL 2.3 |
| * improve hypervisor support |
| * dynamic provisioning of host servers |
| * VMWare Free Server 2.0 |
| * possibly XEN or KVM |
| |
| VCL 2.4 |
| * develop tools for managing both system and user storage |
| |
| With each release, we'll be working toward making VCL easier to install. As |
| part of our move to development at the Apache Software Foundation, it is an |
| obvious goal to create a community of users and more developers around VCL. |
| Bringing in more developers should become easier as VCL becomes easier to |
| install. |
| |
| III. Getting Involved in the ASF VCL Community |
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| There are five ways to become involved in the ASF VCL community. |
| |
| * Join the mailing lists and participate in discussion |
| There are two mailing lists: vcl-user@incubator.apache.org and |
| vcl-dev@incubator.apache.org. To join vcl-user, send an empty message to |
| vcl-user-subscribe@incubator.apache.org. To join vcl-dev, send an empty |
| message to vcl-dev-subscribe@incubator.apache.org. |
| |
| * Submit bug reports and feature requests to our JIRA bug tracking system. |
| See section IV below for more information on doing this. |
| |
| * 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.) |
| |
| * Submit patches through the vcl-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 vcl-dev |
| list explaining what you have done. |
| |
| * 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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| 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). Also, we would |
| appreciate it if you mentioned that you filed a bug on the vcl-dev list to make |
| sure we don't miss it. |
| |
| 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). Again, it would be helpful if you mentioned that you filed a feature |
| request on the vcl-dev list. |
| |
| 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. |
