Volunteers needed -- Automated Image Testing for flavors

[Nicholas Skaggs]

On 08/01/2015 09:19 AM, Sujeevan (svij) Vijayakumaran wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Am 31.07.2015 um 22:32 schrieb Nicholas Skaggs:
>> -svij and shrini agreed to setup a test jenkins instance to help answer
>> our lingering questions on what we need. Specifically they'll be looking at
>> where should we host this?
>> can we test in the cloud?
>> what type of setup should we have (how many slaves, how many instances)?
>> and trying to get us all setup with a jenkins instance we can add jobs
>> to and iterate on moving forward.
>>
> I've set up an Jenkins-Master server today, but there isn't anything yet
> (http://jenkins.svij.org). It runs on digital ocean (for 10$/month +
> 2$/month for backups)
>
> I also had a look into the tests to check the other questions. The sad
> thing is, that we can't host this on digitalocean, because digitalocean
> doesn't support nested kvm virtualisation. The tests do use local kvm on
> the host machine.
>
> We have three options now:
>
>   * rent a physical machine, where we can run the tests on local kvm
>   * buy a physical machine and host that somewhere (e.g. at someones home…)
>   * rent a amazon ec2 instance (which is virtualized but uses hvm with xen)
>
> All three options are kind of expensive. The first option probably needs
> a contract for atleast a year (depends on the provider). IMHO the best
> solution is to use amazon ec2. We could write a script which starts an
> fresh ec2 instance and runs the tests. After that we can drop the ec2
> instance again. Running the ec2 instance (t2.medium with 2GB RAM) 24/7
> would nearly cost 40$… but they were idling most of the time anyway. So
> the best and cheapest option is to only use them, when there are new iso
> images to test. The jenkins master server needs to run 24/7, that could
> continue to run on digital ocean.
>
> I don't have experience with amazon aws/ec2, if theres something wrong,
> please correct me.
>
> Cheers,
> Sujeevan
>
Sujeevan, thanks for looking into this! While I see there's some tricks 
available to allow for nested virtualization, do we know this will 
actually work? Can anyone comment if they've used things like 
xen-blanket in the past for this?

On the other options, I'm open to feedback. Does anyone have suggested 
hardware or hosting since we are looking more and more like we need 
physical servers for this? Those with jenkins experience, what about the 
thought of keeping master as a cloud server, and have a physical machine 
be the slave that is located in someone's house or hosted?

Nicholas