Jenkins - Managing a pool of resources

Question

I'm trying to set up a Jenkins system where a certain program has to be run on a board on the network, accessed using telnet. We're talking about hundreds of such jobs here, therefore we will be setting up multiple boards. Therefore, each job has to be allocated a board, but the catch is that only one job can have a certain board at the same time, otherwise the program fails.

The solution I have right now is using a master-slave set-up where I connect to the same machine using SSH (so a master and multiple slaves on the same machine). Each of the slave nodes then has a label for the IP address the program has to telnet to. This works, scheduling wise, but it might cause issues because all nodes connect using SSH to the same machine. Connecting to the boards using SSH is not an option.

Is there any way to get the same functionality as above, but then without using SSH to connect to the same machine? So basically I want to be able to say: we have n available machines, when a job comes in give it one of those machines and pass it a label belonging to that machine (its IP address in this case); now there are n-1 machines left. Mutual exclusion comes close, but does not allow the above functionality, and jobs waiting for a resource take up one of the executors of a node.

Thanks a lot!

Answer 1

I realize your problem is probably solved already years ago, but in case someone else is looking for the answer and runs into this.

You can use "Lockable resources" plugin and set the ip address as the name of the resource and use label such use test-board-ip.It is simple and easy to use.

Another possibility is to use "External resources dispatcher" plugin. It provides a bit more possibilities, but it has a bug that causes it to hang sometimes. And it seems there is no maintenance any more (last updates from 2013).