Hardware Sizing For 100-agent Bamboo Installation

[Adam Myatt]

Can anyone who runs Bamboo with 50 or 100 remote agents provide any feedback on what size hardware they are running on (# of CPUs, Memory, etc), as well as how many plans they have building and if they have seen performance issues? I'm trying to plan out a near future installation of 100 remote agents and want to try to size our hardware appropriately.

Thanks.

[ReneR · Accepted solution]

For your Bamboo server see this related answer:

https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/11721/server-specifications

For the remote agents, we use Dell R510s, 610s and 710s, with 64-96GB of memory. You want to get the fastest memory and disks that you can -- we usually fill up most of the drive bays (so about 800GB of disk space for those models). Base server uses Scientific Linux and we have KVM virtualisation on top of that. We get a density of about 12 to 18 guests, depending on how we size them (usually 60GB disk and 4 or 6 or 8 GB of RAM). We create separate logical volumes on the host node to give each guest some swap. Our guest OSs can be CentOS, Fedora or Ubuntu.

For Windows builds, we have a couple of ESX servers with VMWare images.

We also use Amazon EC2 for overflow capacity. The Bamboo server instance has no problems coping with 80,100 agents and dozens of plans executing simulatenously. Usually things that are the bottleneck are the network and dependent services like source code servers or artifact repositories (Nexus).

[Adam Myatt]

Rene - thanks for the quick feedback. A few clarifying questions : when you say 12-18 guests do you mean you have 12-18 VMs running on a single physical machine, such as the 510s, 610, 710?

Also, you seem to infer you're assigning 4-8 GB RAM for each VM. Is this correct? Also what type and number of cores do you assign to each VM.

Additionally, for each Bamboo server itself, the key question for performance is how many plans can be configured in them, regardless of whether they are simultaneously running or sitting idle. I would imagine at some point having 500 plans or 1000 plans in the system there would be some sort of limit, even if only a few dozen ran at once?

[Adam Myatt]

Thank you for the feedback. Very valuable!

[Przemek Bruski]

Idle plans: we have customers with >1500 plans on their dashboards. It has some impact on the browser (some pages become a bit heavy), but the server side copes with it just fine.

[ReneR]

Yes, 12-18 guests per single physical machine. Each physical host node uses 2 Intel Xeon X5690, 6 core CPUs. We give each guest 4 virtual cpus.