Using ISA services to manage lab sessions with embedded lab servers

The implementation and maintenance of online laboratories is expensive and partially associated with high administrative efforts. These are reasons, why a common framework capable of efficiently managing online laboratory resources, users and providing mechanisms to create and maintain online laboratory sessions is necessary. An important aspect in the implementation and deployment of an online laboratory is the schema used to assign laboratory time to users. It can be either a queuing based system or a calendar-based booking. While this may sound trivial, the decision between one and another can change how the system is implemented. In this paper we will outline how we will deploy the services provided by the iLab Shared Architecture to manage the access to a pool of embedded lab servers hosted by the University of Porto.