Our team has a full licence for the TeamCity server, as well as 7 additional agents. Another unrelated team has reached the limits of their free TeamCity licence and is eyeing our licences up.
The powers that be think it’s a good idea to run both teams using the same enterprise licence, which means that we’d be hosting the TeamCity configurations on the same server, and either sharing agents or somehow assigning some agents to one team, some to another.
One concern I have is that configuring an agent to only accept certain builds is difficult – our team has hundreds of build configurations, and we create new ones all the time. To limit an agent to certain builds, you have to fully specify the whitelist. So maintaining the agents such that we have full use of some agents, and the other team has full use of theirs will be a pain. On the other hand, just using one pool of agents means now you have arguments over priority and starvation, etc.
Does anyone have any experience of this? Is it a workable solution? How do you configure agents to reserve them for a particular team? How do you configure the server so that each team only sees their own projects, build configurations and agents? Basically what we’d want is complete separation of the projects, just using the same TeamCity server and agents.
As a gut feeling it doesn’t look like a good idea…
edit: As an aside, does Hudson do this better? The ivory tower architects want us to change from TeamCity to Hudson because other people are using Hudson. If I tell them this sharing TeamCity won’t work, the Hudson camp will probably use it as a stick to beat us with. Joy.
Not sure what version of TeamCity you’re using but the newly released TeamCity v7.0 now has a new Agent Pool feature that provides a much easier way to distribute agents. It may be of interested to you, check out the What’s New section or the Agent Pools docs for more info.
I had a similar issue with our two departments starting to share the same TeamCity instance to save the expenses of additional licenses. I must admit we didn’t really have any issues apart from our agents were now twice as busy.
I enabled Per-project permissions on the Global Settings page and created 2 user groups, one for ‘us’, and the other for ‘them’. You can then configure each group’s roles accordingly. If a group does not have the Project Viewer role for a project then it does not appear for them – a great way to only display necessary projects to the group; but there are plenty of other role options to use.
I have never used Hudson so can’t compare unfortunately. I should really try it out but as I’ve always got on so well with TC I’ve never had a reason too.