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Standard envir onments for exploiting idle time ofworkstations are base d on some kind of spying processthat detects low CPU usage and informs to a scheduler so that work can be disp atche d. This approachgener ateslocal interfer enc eand, sinc e the same localenvir onmentis used, could lead to security problems.We are investigating the exploitation of idle times innetwork resources based onacomplete mode change ina candidate node. After the dete ction that some nodeis idle, a Mode-Switcher boots a new operating systemthat will work over a separate disk partition. After theboot phase the node is linkedto a logical network topology and is available to receive jobs. Users can allocateno des fr om this virtual cluster thr ough a standard front-end as they would do in a "conventional" cluster. Because nodes may leave and join this virtual machine weuse a distribute dprocessormanagement to allow userapplic ationsto cope with this dynamic resour ce behavior. In this paper we describ e the architecture of thevirtual cluster and present the results obtained with aMode-Switcher and a prototyp eapplic ationunder realuse conditions.