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Virtual Build Machine

This blog entry inspired by Build Machine Virtualization by Obishawn.

We also use virtual machines for our build environment.  We have a pretty beefy server - Dual Xeon with 6GB RAM and RAID 5, running Server 2003 64 bit edition and can run quite a few VM's simultaneously (we also use VM's to run other Version Control Systems and other software which FinalBuilder supports).

We have a few build machines; firstly there is the mainline build machine which uses the mainline branch to build the latest and greatest.  Each time we have a minor or major release, we clone the build machine.  So, for example, when we released FinalBuilder 4.1, we cloned the mainline build and called it FB41Maint.  Sometimes we fix a bug and have to back-port it to FinalBuilder 3... easy, fire up the FB3 build machine and run the build :)

For all this VM business, we're actually using VMWare Professional.  It works great.  We did try VMWare Server (when it was in Beta) and it didn't want to open our existing vm's for some reason?... so we went back to VMWare pro.

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rahul 19 years ago

madarchod



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