Need Clarification on customizing Lab Management Lab Resource types, environments and purpose of Lab Resource Group?

Replying to your questions - 

1. No you can not create custom Lab Resource Type as of now. The resource type has to be Physical/Virtual Machine or Virtual Image. But you can add various attribute to your machine type and have your customised attributes be part of one of these basic types. 

For that  please see following section of Manage Project Properties portal ->

Administrator Icon -> Manage Project Properties -> "Lab Resource and Channel Properties". Under this option, you would find list of basic attribute provided by default. The "Machine" and "Virtual Images" can be further modified with additional attributes you want to have for your customisation.

2. Conceptually, Environment is a set of attribute to find those lab resources which belong to having same set of attributes which environment has defined. Environment is a way of finding appropriate or applicable lab resource automatically. So a manual way of linking resource and environment may not be needed. For example - Lab Resources are found and assigned to Test Cell based on selected Test Environment. Please refer to this link for Test Cell - https://jazz.net/help-dev/clm/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.rational.test.qm.doc/topics/t_cre_test_cells.html&scope=null 

You can choose to create an attribute which can be common between Resource and Environment both. This would help to pick the Resources which belong to that environment based on that custom attribute. This could be one way to have a indirect link between Resource and Environment. 

3. Real advantage of Lab Resource Group is its association with a Team Area. Lab Resource group is assigned to a team. This ensures that the resource pertaining to a group belong to the members of associated team area only.

I hope these answers are helpful. 

Thanks,

Abhishek