How to use hudson when building for multiple platforms

Question

Right now we are building a number of C++ apps for Win32 platform. We will be soon porting to Linux and then maybe more (32 and 64 bits for both).

What is the standard practice , do you use multiple hudson servers each on their own platform to do a build, or does the hudson service create VMs and do builds?

It is not clear to me the best practical way to do this.

Ideally I just want one box with a bunch of VMs running hudson, and then it kicks off builds as needed.

Is there a resource someone can point me to for this?

Answer 1

We use Hudson to manage C/C++ (GNU C, GNU C++, Watcom C) builds for multiple OSs. For us, software is built for Linux, Linux x64, QNX 4, and QNX6. The way we have it set up is:

• 1 x VM for the Hudson server, running Windows
• 4 x VMs, one for each slave type, so I have 4 Hudson slaves - 1 each for QNX4, QNX6 and Linux 32 and Linux 64. All of them are running on the same server, just as different VMs, and we have faced no problems. We build about a 100 projects, divided almost equally between the 4 system types.

You should not require any additional hardware. There is a Hudson plugin that works with VMWare VMs, to start them up and shut them down as required.

I hope that helps.