The management of computing laboratories used in education institutions faced challenges for example to know in advance the required software, have an estimate of the required resources and deal with the maintenance of the lab. Nowadays the Cloud presents a model where computing resources can be elastically provisioned and released according to consumer demand, a model that seems fitting well to the needs of computing labs.
This paper presents an agnostic architecture for a platform that allows the provision of virtual desktop laboratories using a cloud infrastructure.
Following the proposed architecture, a perfectly functional platform using OpenStack cloud resources is implemented. It is straightforward to add support for the other Cloud infrastructures, just being required to adapt the data module, namely the components for Cloud services.