Grouper Developers Forum

[Rob Hebron <>]

That would depend on how many VMs we'd want to be running. If we go for 
the 3 OSS ones to avoid licensing issues (one HSQL, one Postgres and one 
MySQL), then I'd say 4gb per VM, with another 4gb to hold the base image 
and another 4 Gb for the CI server, configuration tools and space for a 
compressed final VM. This works out at about 20Gb, but as disk usage 
only ever goes up I'd play safe with a 30Gb estimate.

Rob

On 16/12/10 16:46, Chris Hyzer wrote:
> This sounds great.  How much disk space would you need altogether?
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: 
>
>  
> [mailto:]
>  On Behalf Of Rob Hebron
> Sent: Thursday, December 16, 2010 9:26 AM
> To: 
>
> Subject: [grouper-dev] VMs for testing and demo/tryout
>
> An action on me from the last call was to look at this.
>
> It seems to be fairly commonly done as part of a continuous integration
> (CI) build process. The idea is that a build/test cycle is farmed out to
> VMs for building and testing with results reported back to the CI
> server. There is no standardisation on what VM technology to use
> (although some CI servers have helper plugins written for some
> virtualisation platforms), it normally comes down to scripting a process
> to run through whatever interface is available. The main advantage is
> that you end up with a fully repeatable build/test process and can
> guarantee a clean system before each run.
>
> I've set up my Huson CI server to run a build/test cycle for Grouper. It
> checks out the code from svn, builds it and runs the tests using gsh.
> Then it parses the output to report test failures. It would be easy
> enough to set it up to test multiple databases one after another. I've
> also tested starting a VM as part of the process and running the
> build/test cycle on this using a remote logon. It's turned out to be
> fairly straightforward. The trick seems to be to have a base image to
> clone when creating a new VM, and then install everything needed for the
> build/test onto it. At the moment I throw away the VM when I'm finished
> with it, but it would be very little work to clean it up a little and
> make it suitable as a demo/test platform.
>
> So, to take it any further we'd need to think about whether we want to
> use a CI server for Grouper builds and testing, where it would be
> hosted, whether the relatively small amount additional effort that using
> VMs calls for is worth it, and if so what virtualisation technology we
> should target. I think a good approach would be to have as little
> dependence as possible on the virutalisation technology and use some
> like CF Engine or Puppet to configure the VM automatically rather than
> use a proprietary API. Once it's configured the CI server could connect
> up and do its stuff.
>
> In summary, it's been pretty easy to set up on my own servers and could
> help in testing Grouper releases, as well as meaning we could end up
> with a VM. What do people think? It it worth going down this route?
>
> Rob