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.
As a project member, you can request machines from a cloud, and view allocable inventory
and the costs and specifications of those resources. When you're done with the machine,
you return it back to the cloud.