To RHEL or Not to RHEL?

[Tim Flink]

On Mon, 11 May 2015 13:09:33 -0600
Kevin Fenzi <kevin at scrye.com> wrote:

> On Sat, 9 May 2015 12:05:04 -0600
> Tim Flink <tflink at redhat.com> wrote:
> 
> > This was brought up a little while ago and we decided to put off the
> > discussion a little bit but I'd like to re-start the conversation
> > before we get too much farther with disposable clients.
> > 
> > My plan for how our hosts would be set up once we deploy support for
> > disposable clients is this:
> >   - virthosts would have N buildslave processes running on them
> >   - each buildslave would launch VMs for disposable clients as
> > needed
> >   - each virthost would have access to a shared filesystem used to
> >     store at least VM images, maybe logs and other data
> 
> Thats each virthost, not all virthosts having the same storage right?

All of the virthosts (at least in each group of dev/stg/prod) would
have a chunk of shared storage used to store the canonical VM images
that we use to boot the disposable clients (the disk changes would be
done locally to the virthosts). This way we only have to build them once
instead of once per virthost.

In the back of my head, I'm thinking that it may make sense to store
logs and artifacts on a chunk of shared storage instead of
transferring everything to the taskotron master using buildbot. I
figure that may make sense if the shared storage is already set up but
this hasn't gotten past the "thinking about it" stage yet :).

> ...snip good description of pros and cons...
> 
> > I think that infra would like to see us migrate to RHEL so that the
> > Taskotron systems are more like everything else that supports Fedora
> > but I don't think that they'd object to us running Fedora as long as
> > we accept responsibility for keeping everything working and actually
> > do it. If we do decide that we'd prefer to keep Fedora, we'll
> > discuss it with them but I wanted to start the discussion here
> > before bothering the infra folks with it.
> 
> Yeah, we run Fedora in places it makes sense to do so (builders are
> all fedora for example), but they are some more work. 
>  
> > I suspect that our virthosts for Taskotron will be slightly
> > different from infra's either way - we still need to figure out a
> > shared filesystem for the images (gluster is the first thing that
> > comes to mind but there are other options) and none of infra's
> > virthosts have that. They do use gluster for a few things, so I
> > suspect that it'd be less work to set that up on rhel than fedora.
> 
> gluster might be actually easier on fedora. RHEL ships all gluster but
> the server in base repos, but the server is in some storage channel,
> etc. 

Hrm, I would have expected it to be the other way around. I also
figured that gluster would be one of those things that was the most
likely to cause trouble on upgrades but that's just instinct, no
experience to back it up.

> I'm happy to provide any info or support needed. 

Thanks for the info, it's much appreciated.

Tim

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