Jenkins multiple masters

Question

We are planning to implement a little Jenkins server farm which will continuously build our binaries as code is getting checked in.

• Plan to have around 500-600 odd VMs in this farm

A few questions that arise then are:

1) Should we go with 1 master - multiple slave configuration OR should we have a multiple master-multiple slave configuration? The second seems the obvious choice, however, reading around I found out that resource utilization is much better with the first option.

2) Is there a Jenkins plugin which can facilitate multiple masters - basically so that if a job comes in it is load balanced across the masters which then delegate it to any available slave.

3) Can Jenkins scale upto 500-600 slaves with 1 master alone?

Answer 1

For your proposed configuration it might be worth going with the commercial product from CloudBees http://www.cloudbees.com/jenkins/enterprise. They will give you support and also have load balanced and high availability plugins which the open source version lacks

Answer 2

Full disclosure: I am the maintainer of Buildbot.

I found this question by looking at current state of the Art for Jenkins multi-master.

Buildbot since 0.9.3 has multimaster support and can easily support 500-600 slaves (we call them workers) http://docs.buildbot.net/latest/manual/concepts.html#multimaster

Buildbot is fully open-source, and has a community of freelancers who can help if you need paid support.