A cloud is a group of machines from which users can borrow or rent for some period of
time. In Lab Management, clouds are groups of
physical systems from a corporate data center or from public resources like Amazon
EC2.
When you pool physical resources into clouds, they get used more efficiently.
- You can partition physical hosts into different virtual machines that are
allocated into any project that needs them.
- You can set prices for how much virtual systems cost per hour.
A
Lab Management site can have many clouds. Cloud
resources can be public or private.
- A public cloud is available across projects in the domain.
- A private cloud is available only for the project that owns it.
If a project administrator allows public clouds for a project, members of that
project can allocate systems from any of those clouds, not just the ones owned by the
project.
Project members can request machines from a cloud, and view allocable inventory and the
costs and specifications of those resources. When they're done with the machine, they
return it back to the cloud.
Moderated clouds
With Lab Management 2.6, clouds can be moderated. When a project member requests a host from a moderated
cloud, the host is not immediately provisioned. Instead, the request is sent to the
administrator for approval. The administrator evaluates the available resources and
approves or rejects the request.