Maximum number of TFs agents connected to a TFS instance - tfs

On Team Foundation (TFS2017) which is the maximum number of build agents that you can have connected to your TFS instance?

There is not any official document statement the limitation of build agent numbers with TFS for now. Also didn't get any related prompt info such as: build agents have reached the maximum.
For multiple machines, you could configure as much as you require, there is no evidently limitation.
For a single machine, it depends on the hardware. If your agent server is virtual, then it is already slower as compared to the physical, you also need to allocate sufficient RAM for it.
Can I install multiple private agents on the same machine?
Yes. This approach can work well for agents that run jobs that don't
consume a lot of shared resources.
You might find that in other cases you don't gain much efficiency
by running multiple agents on the same machine. For example, it might
not be worthwhile for agents that run builds that consume a lot of
disk and I/O resources.
You might also run into problems if concurrent build processes are
using the same singleton tool deployment, such as NPM packages. For
example, one build might update a dependency while another build is in
the middle of using it, which could cause unreliable results and
errors.
Source Link

It depends on how many cores agent server has. One Agent will take up one core.

Related

How to build on all agents in Jenkins pipeline?

I'm trying to build a Jenkins declarative pipeline that will build on all agents in parallel.
How can I do this without disabling sandbox?
I have come across this page: https://jenkins.io/blog/2017/09/25/declarative-1/ but it seems repetitive, especially when padded out with my code as nearly all operations are performed almost the same on every node. Is there a way to do this and avoid repeating code?
I suggest that you follow the common pattern described in the referenced article.
By assigning labels identifying the node's operating system and allocating nodes based on these labels, you ensure that the job runs exactly once in each of the different build environments.
A severe drawback of your suggestion to build on all of the available agents (as said, I don't know anything how to actually do that)) would be in the case of one or multiple build agents being offline. So you don't run on Windows, because the server was just rebooting, but your build result is green as nothing failed? Not a good idea, isn't it?
Another benefit of the label-based approach is that you can easily add additional build agents to cope with increased number of builds, e.g., as your team grows. You don't want to build twice on Windows, when you add another build agent with Windows, right?
So I strongly recommend: Assign labels to your build agents and then specify, on which agents your job needs to run.

What are best practices for jenkins security?

What are the best practices for a jenkins installation like the one below?
I do have a quite small dedicated server with 16 gb of ram and 2tb of diskspace with enabled hardware virtualization, and one use of it would be to host my own projects (opensource), and there are applications set up such as git repository manager and stuff.
I would like to set up jenkins there for automatic building, but I want to make it secure.
This installation is small enough to require only a master node, but I am planning to disable building on master completely, and to run a virtual machine as an agent, for the reason that it would be isolated as much as possible on the same physical server, so that a job would be unable to destroy jenkins master data.
Should I go for master only anyway? or, if using a virtual machine agent, should I have only one executor there or multiple ones? I probably cannot isolate multiple parallel jobs running on one agent without using one agent per job, but maybe I am overthinking all this. Using one agent per job, at least in case of virtual machines, would exhaust server resources very quickly, or alternatively, money.
You can use Jenkins own database of users, which I have used in commercial settings and it has worked perfectly well. If you have Active Directory you can also integrate with this if you want to go to extra effort so people only have to remember one login.
Once users are logged in you should provide authorisation via the Role-Strategy plugin

Randomise slave load on Mesos

trying to solve some problem with Mesos. I have three build servers for Jenkins. Jenkins schedules jobs on them through Mesos.
For now, Mesos loads one agent(slave) as hard as possible, but I want it to spread jobs across all agents..
As I see, it's better to run three jobs on three agents, than on one.
Is it possible to randomise job scheduling?
Or perhaps, I have such scenario. 2 large servers and one mini. I want to schedule Jobs on mini by default, and if it's not enough resources, then proceed to large servers. How can I achieve this goal? Is it possible to set priority for agents(slaves) to specify on which agent I want job to run at first?
The Mesos plugin for Jenkins attempts to build on the most recently built slave (see this method). This means that once it builds on that machine once, as long as that machine still has available spare resources - it'll schedule additional jobs on that machine until it is full. Right now it looks like that isn't optional (I have filed it as a feature request).

Can I host my own travis runner?

I work on a large open source project based on ruby on rails. We use Github, Travis, Code Climate and others. Our test suite takes a long time to run and we have many pull requests opened and updated through the day, which creates a large backlog. We even implemented a build killer in our bot to prevent any unnecessary builds, however we still have a backlog. Is it possible for us to host our own runner to increase the number of workers?
There's Travis CI Enterprise (https://enterprise.travis-ci.com/) that lets people host their own runners, but that's probably mostly only for paid-for customers. Have you guys swapped over to the container-based builds? Might speed things up a bit. What's the project?

How many Remote Nodes can Jenkins manage

How many Remote Nodes can Jenkins manage ? Are there any limitations/memory issues?
What is more effective:
1) 100 Nodes 1 executor per node ?
2) 5 Nodes with 20 executors per node ?
Tx.
As far as i know, there is no limitation on # of nodes one can have although your system might feel like saying, enough is enough! Issues such as number of processes per user (we got this issue recently, not with Jenkins but some other application where RAM and disk space were fine but the system stopped responding. We started getting system cannot fork() error), total number of open files etc. Few such issues might still be configurable but may not be allowed/feasible.
If resource (in your case, nodes) is not a constraint, which process wouldn't like to run wild? :) In practical cases, generally you wouldn't have the flexibility to opt for first option. In second case where you have 5 nodes with 20 executors, all you have to make sure is not to tie up jobs to a particular node unless you have a compelling reason.
Some slaves are faster, while others are slow. Some slaves are closer (network wise) to a master, others are far away. So doing a good build distribution is a challenge. Currently, Jenkins employs the following strategy:
If a project is configured to stick to one computer, that's always honored.
Jenkins tries to build a project on the same computer that it was previously built.
Jenkins tries to move long builds to slaves, because the amount of network interaction between a master and a slave tends to be logarithmic to the duration of a build (IOW, even if project A takes twice as long to build as project B, it won't require double network transfer.) So this strategy reduces the network overhead.
You should also have a look at these links:
https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Least+Load+Plugin
https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Gearman+Plugin

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