[Buildbot-devel] Running tests in a VMware Virtual Machine

[Axel Hecht]

I just glanced over the vmware site to get a rough idea, it mentions
that the COM api is deprecated?

Anyway, having steps that manipulate VMs sounds like a great idea. I
guess that the testing sequence you mention as a step below should
really be a builder, and that the steps should be something like
"snapshot VM as ..." and "rollback VM to ..." or so.

As I'm totally unaware of VMs beyond the fact that I know that I have
access to some ;-), I'm not sure if those steps should run code on a
slave or not. The SDK mentions something like "run the SDK wherever,
it just needs access to the webservice", which may or may not be good
enough. Maybe it's a good idea to run the actual SDK code optionally
on a slave, if there are firewalls in the way or something.

Depending on the dependencies (sic), it may or may not make sense to
bundle the code into buildbot itself.

I'm curious what Paul and Rob think, too.

Axel

2007/7/20, Sidnei da Silva <sidnei at enfoldsystems.com>:
> Hi all,
>
> I was wondering if anyone thought about this before or has it working.
>
> VMware Server and VMware Workstation 6.0 have a COM API. We can (AFAICT)
> access this COM API from Python, using PyWin32. So, we could create a
> buildbot Step that:
>
> 1. Creates a snapshot named after the build number
> 2. Copies the result of a previous step into the VM
> 3. Runs an installer
> 4. Runs tests inside the VM
> 5. Copies test results back to the 'guest OS' and upload
>    them to the build master
>
> This would be mostly useful for doing integration/functional testing
> of installers and such. An example of what I have in mind is testing
> the Plone Installer for Windows by running the installer, making sure
> services start up and that the Plone site is created and accessible,
> and possibly running Selenium tests against the newly created site,
> uploading the test results back to the build master.
>
> Thoughts? Would this be a worthy addition to the buildbot codebase
> or should it be kept as a separate extension?
>
> --
> Sidnei da Silva
> Enfold Systems, Inc.
>