As with any lab management solution, you have to make sure that reservation scheme you set up is used by everyone (automated tests and human beings). anyone not using the reservation system and accessing the equipment directly can cause problems. Trying to set up a perfect reservation system where no one as access to the equipment till they reserve requires huge investment in hardware, firewalls and technology and make them work together. However, in a lightweight version, where you are willing to accept that if someone bypasses the "rules of accessing lab devices", and it is OK, one can set up some very simple reservation systems, For example:
1. You can call a procedure which iterates over list of devices in the testbed and creates lock files on a central share. If lock file exists, it waits for lock file to disappear before proceeding. At the end of execution, it can clear lock files. You can use timestamp of the lock file to determine if certain lock files were left because a testcase got killed and did not return the reservation.
2. You can use database session to add/remove reservation records - you can create your own schema and poll the database to see if someone has already added a reservation record. This logic can be encapsulated in a procedure to be used by all testcases.
There are many other schemes one can come up with for very simple reservation systems.
