Team City Build Agent per target environment?

Question

I am new to the whole CI process and have been tasked with researching a solution. So this may sound like a dumb question to some...

So, I have been looking at Team City (Pro version) and was wondering if it was necessary to set up separate build agents based on the target environment.

Our application portfolio includes some legacy web apps that run on a Windows Server 2003 box. Newer more recently developed web apps run on Windows Server 2008 R2. Naturally we have separate test boxes for each environment.

Should I set up a build agent for each server o/s? (i.e. one for 2003 and for 2008). I guess it would make sense to seeing as the build output should be production release ready.

EDIT: Developing .NET apps

Answer 1

If all your apps runs on .NET then it doesnt matter which machine they will be compiled on. (assuming the .net framework you are targetting runs on both 2003 and 2008)

So in your case I would have one build agent running on 2008 that would produce builds for ALL of your environments.

The purpose of multi build agents is to distribute your builds over multiple machines which can be very useful if you have many products and frequent checkins. For a simple initial setup it is fine to have 1 build agent.

Now, as part of the build/deployment process you could have your build agent DEPLOY the builds to both 2003 and 2008 machines. TC is not intended for deployment but it still can be used to deploy builds quite easily if all the machines are on the same LAN.