What is a small starter system? One chassis with 4-14 blades will do it, plus some disk storage. (A few Terabytes of disk storage will take you a long way.) That's enough to get a full VCL system running and to do real classes on a pilot basis. You'll use one blade for a LAMP server to run the VCL web interface and MySQL database, another blade for a Management Node, and the rest for user services. Even without any virtualization (hypervising) that will give about 2 to 12 concurrent logins. It's your decision whether to start with "bare metal" blades, or to use a hypervisor. If you are already familiar with a hypervisor it can be a reasonable way to start. If not, "bare metal" has one less complication.
One chassis is easy to handle, doesn't require any outside network switches to handle Management Node to blade communications, and lets all of the VCL software be exercised. Auth/auth was mentioned above. Your choice is whether to start with local accounts only, or to interface to your Identity Management system at first. An incremental approach is to start simple - with local-only accounts. Our experience is that this is quite acceptable to students who are using the VCL in pilots for courses. (I'm a believer in the Hawthorne Effect, q.v., and have found that faculty and students generally like to exercise productive new technologies.) There are other chores in the course of bringing up the small starter system which are identical to starting any size system. So this learning curve must be climbed, and it makes sense to climb it via this small starter system. Next, details of the "other chores." -- --henry schaffer
