Poll: Build Server in a Virtual Machine?

Question

Is it better to have a Build Server in a virtual machine? Do the benefits of having a build server in a VM outweigh the costs?

Answer 1

Here's some of the advantages of running your build server in a virtual environment:

Share one screaming fast box across several build servers - say you've got half a dozen build servers. Put together one very fast (4-cpu, 64-128gb ram, very fast hard drives, etc) machine and run a hypervisor on it. Now, all of the build servers can access this faster hardware if they're doing builds when other build servers aren't. Establish a build schedule, and you should be able to do faster builds. If you have to use physical boxes, you probably won't be able to afford that quality level of hardware on each individual build server - but that's easier to justify when it's shared.

No downtime when the box fails - instead of your production builds coming to a crashing halt whenever there's a hardware problem, you can simply boot up the build server on another virtualization host. (This only works well if you're using shared storage.)

Easy hardware upgrades - when it's time for a new build server, you don't have to do any pesky OS reinstalls. Just move the guest OS over to the new physical host, and you're off to the races.