Jenkins for cluster deployment testing

[Padmanabh Sahasrabudhe]

Has anybody used any Jenkins plugin for HA kind of testing deployment setup on different machines?

Jenkins allows only 1 slave machine which can be used for standalone server testing automation setup.

But if I want to have a distributed setup on different machines is there any way available in Jenkins or other tool?

Regards,
Padmanabh

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

Padmanabh Sahasrabudhe wrote:Jenkins allows only 1 slave machine which can be used for standalone server testing automation setup.

Why do you say that? I've used Jenkins with more than one slave. The Jenkins documentation even talks about slaves in the plural.

[Padmanabh Sahasrabudhe]

Thanks Jeanne.

By more than one slave I meant I can't use more than one slave in one job.

Imagine I start a job which requires silent installation of test server on more than one machine and then trigger automation tests in the same job. Is this possible with jenkins? I read the link you have given, but didn't get any explicit mention of this.

Thanks,
Padmanabh

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

Selenium Grid runs jobs on multiple machines.

I'm not sure I understand your scenario though. If you want to install on multiple slaves, why not have multiple jobs. Or is the idea to always run on certain slaves?

[Padmanabh Sahasrabudhe]

To make it more clear. Suppose I have a HA scenario where I have 5 instances of my application server should be installed in parallel and then run a set of tests. In this case waiting sequentially for 5 jobs to complete is time consuming. Triggering 5 jobs in parallel with one slave each may be a solution but not sure if I can have completion status as in put parametter from all the 5 jobs to a next job which will run the tests. So I was looking at a way to have the installation of 5 instances on 5 different machines through one jenkins job and then run the tests in the same job. I hope I am clear now. Thanks for link to Selenium Grid .

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

I finally understand the question! Selenium Grid isn't the solution. But it does show that a job started by Jenkins can communicate with multiple servers.

I don't think you should have 5 different jobs for your scenario. I would consider using a shell script for the deployments. (And have Jenkins kick off the shell script in one job.) This lets you have more control and do the deployments through ssh/scp commands.

Remember that you can have multiple build steps in Jenkins. The shell script that does the deployments can be one step. Running the tests can be another.