VCL 2.5 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. Notable Changes The following are some notable changes from previous releases. Added: * Support for Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016 images * Responsive theme (dropdownmenus) to web site * Support for automatically joining Windows images to an Active Directory domain * Basic automatic mounting of NFS shares for all users * Customization of email messages sent to users on a per-affiliation basis * Support for the automatic configuration of ufw and firewalld-based firewalls within Linux images * Support for NAT hosts which use ufw os firewalld-based firewalls including Ubuntu and RedHat/CentOS 7 and later * Support for the execution of custom scripts on a management node at various stages of the reservation * Display of reservation times in the user's own timezone Removed: * Server Profiles * Use of the Windows Administrator user account for imaging reservations ================================= 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: user@vcl.apache.org and dev@vcl.apache.org. To join user, send an empty message to user-subscribe@vcl.apache.org. To join dev, send an empty message to dev-subscribe@vcl.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 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 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. * If you are interested in contributing something to the project, please discuss it on the dev list BEFORE starting work on it. This allows the community to be involved in decisions and allows current developers to provide some guidance. 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). 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). 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.