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VCL 2.1
I. Intro and Description
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.
II. VCL Roadmap
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
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.
IV. How to Submit Bugs and Feature Requests
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.