How to bring up VM's using Jenkins?

[David Aldrich]

Hi

 

We want to run a matrix build of a job across a set of Virtual Machines that run on a single server.  The VMs use a lot of resources so we don’t want them to be up concurrently.

 

Is it possible for Jenkins to bring up a VM before running a job and then take it down afterwards, then bring up another VM and run the job again?

 

Perhaps using Vagrant?

 

Any pointers would be appreciated.

 

Best regards

 

David

 

[Michael Neale]

There are many ways to "skin this cat" so to speak - various cloud plugins, or things like docker can do this. 

If you are thinking vagrant and VMs on demand, docker pipeline or one of the docker plugins could help with this (as it can quickly create containers as needed, but for the cost of one persistently running vm to host the docker daemon, or if you are on linux, there is no overhead really).