Virtualization Question ...

Sat Apr 30 11:59:50 PDT 2011

2011/4/30 Roger Oberholtzer <roger at opq.se>:
>
>> > I should add that i'm currently waiting on funding to deploy a large
>> > number of Linux VMs as well.  Once that happens, the total count will
>> > likely rise to around 80 total VMs with 47 being Windows.   The joys
>> > of corporate bureaucracy in America.
>
> I want to set up a compile/test/distribute farm where I can support numerous
> OS, including various Linux and Windows releases. The issue is how best to get
> them to start various tasks and how to collect the resullts. My framework is
> Hudson, with a bit of Trac thrown in to trigger some subversion related
> activity. The things that are done by hand should be automated to increase the
> chance that they happen more predictably. Same story as everyone else.
>
> Just curious what test framework you are using to make these VMs earn their
> keep?

I'm not familiar with Hudson, and I've only used Trac a few times as
an end user.  My VM's are primarily used as automated build
environments.  Initially I needed to do quite a bit of trial & error
to find the sweet spot in terms of the number of VMs per system.  It
was a tradeoff between getting the builds done faster versus buying
more HW.  Keep in mind that at this point, the majority of my VM's are
Windows7 so I'll have to go through this exercise again once I ramp up
the number of Linux VMs, as they will definitely scale differently
(AKA 'better').  The most amusing part of this setup is that the
builds running inside of the VM are completing *faster* than on native
HW.  Just goes to prove what complete s**t the Windows disk/IO device
drivers are.

Our build jobs are managed by an internally created test harness,
which is little more than a deamon which polls a database for work.
The database is PostgreSQL running on completely separate dedicated
server (with plans, if/when I have the time to setup a hot spare or
some sort of load balancing).