What is a cloud in Lab Management?

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.