[Buildbot-devel] buildbot for testers

[Brad Hards]

On Wednesday 27 May 2009 02:52:27 am Kregg Kemper wrote:
>     What I don't think builbot does is start and stop VMs that are needed
> to run tests on and also manage the limited resources on a VM server. I'll
> give an example from my experience what this means. A test groups might be
> testing many code baselines within a company but have limited VM server(s)
> that can only handle a handful of images running at one time. Testers for
> these different baselines might have 5+ VMs that launch for each build they
> support. When a lot of builds come in (Friday evening) the testbot must
> store the tests on a queue and launch tests as a slot is available on the
> server. I use VMWare for virtualization,  but these capabilities should
> work on other technologies like Xen or Virtual PC.
There is some support for something like this in the current version of 
buildbot. The work (by Gary Poster) is currently based on Amazon EC2, but 
could probably be fairly easily extended to support VMware or Xen.

See 
http://djmitche.github.com/buildbot/docs/0.7.10/#Writing-New-Latent-Buildslaves

I don't see direct support for limiting the number of vm's that are running, 
but I'm sure you can come up with something.

Brad