Hello, I am investigating our build environment configuration for a new project. Up till now we used a bunch of old (but memory rich) pc's as build servers for our projects. The current company policy is to use virtual servers on one 'giant' physical server. And for now, the plan is to put the build server(s) on this machine too. But I am not sure this is a good plan, performance wise. Also because we are planning to do continuous integration (with cruise control) on it. Does anyone have any experience with this kind ofconfiguration?
We use VMWare server, and our build machines (we have separate build machines for FB4 & FB5) run on it fine. I will admit though, we did recently get a newer faster dual cpu (dual core too) server with more memory to improve the performance of the build machines. We are also running the development build of FB server on the FB5 build machine with daily and adhoc builds, not yet doing builds on checkin but will be as soon as that is working in FBServer.
I think Virtul machines are definitely the way to go for build machines, much easier to do disaster recovery too (as we found out earlier this year when our office was flooded!).
Ok, thanks. We will go for it than. And I will ask the guys "if upgrading hardware when needed is possible”, so they feel it coming :-) FBServer? Looking forward to that one.
Agree as well. Doing builds on a VM is slower… But the benefits are soooo much better. As Vincent stated, having to have a few big files backed up, then restored for disater recovery is… priceless. Plus… Moving to faster hardware is a snap.