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. 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.
 | Disclaimer Apache VCL is an effort undergoing incubation at The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), sponsored by the name of sponsor. Incubation is required of all newly accepted projects until a further review indicates that the infrastructure, communications, and decision making process have stabilized in a manner consistent with other successful ASF projects. While incubation status is not necessarily a reflection of the completeness or stability of the code, it does indicate that the project has yet to be fully endorsed by the ASF. |
User Documentation
- Overview for VCL Users (those doing daily management of a VCL installation)
- Documentation for VCL Administrators (those doing a VCL installation)
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.
- Help with the documentation, both end-user and installation.
- Help improve the website.
Mailing lists
- User mailing list vcl-user-subscribe@incubator.apache.org
- Development List vcl-dev-subscribe@incubator.apache.org
Archives
- Search: http://markmail.org/set/jlmr2rdvup4w2
- User: http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-vcl-user
- Development: http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-vcl-dev
Project Resources
| Confluence | http://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/VCL |
| Subversion Repository | https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/vcl |
| JIRA | http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/VCL |
| Current version | VCL 2.2.1 |
| Release Roadmap | ASF VCL JIRA Roadmap |
| User Documentation | Documentation (work in progress: Diagrams, Install guide) |
| Architecture Diagram |
VCL Architecture |
| IRC | #asfvcl on Freenode |
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 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
- 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
- Privilege control - 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
Terminology:Bare-metal = a physical server (such as a blade server) as opposed to a virtual machineNode = a computerResource = a compute node, an image, a management node, or a scheduleManagement Node = a process server or the machine where vcld is running; processes user requests assigned by the scheduler; does the provisioning
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-mcrypt
- php-mysql
- php-openssl
- php-sysvsem
- php-xml
- php-xmlrpc
- libmcrypt and mcrypt libraries installed for php-mcrypt (GPL)
- Dojo Toolkit 0.4.0 and 1.1.0 (modified BSD license or the Academic Free License version 2.1)
Database
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)