Virtual computing lab (VCL) open cloud deployment

Cloud computing is a new computing paradigm, which utilizes dissipated resource benefits and supports resource sharing and time access flexibility. In addition, cloud provides different kinds of services mapped to users needs such as Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a service (IaaS). There are two different types of cloud implementations: commercial cloud solutions such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Microsoft Azure; and non-commercial (open source) cloud solutions such as Apache VCL and Open-Stack cloud. This paper discusses the Apache VCL cloud framework, its architecture, functionality, properties, and its workflow. It helps the user target groups, such as students, teachers and researchers to verify the VCL.