Ahead of the Release Curve III: Virtually There
The How-Does-This-Affect-Me? Version
Various Tinderboxen will be down next week, in cycles, so we can migrate them into virtual machines.
These migrations will start on Tuesday, 9 May, and will be performed in three rounds, with about four tinderboxen per round.
During each round, these machines will be unavailable for a 24 hour period. The migrations will not affect the Bon Echo Alpha 2 release plans.
The Short Version
Step 1. Move all Tinderboxen to VMs
Step 2. ????
Step 3. PROFIT!
The Long(er) Version
Starting with planning and help from Chase, over the past five months, we’ve been working towards migrating all of Mozilla’s Tinderboxen into virtual machines.
For those not familiar with the technology—VMware and Xen are players in the space with a lot of name recognition; Microsoft has an offering too, but it makes me giggle—virtualization offers the ability to run multiple instances of a full-blown operating system and an associated work load on the same piece of hardware. These OS instances are isolated from each other (conceptually, at least).
We’ve already migrated certain branches to virtualized Tinderboxen. Currently, the Firefox and Thunderbird maintenance branches are built using virtual machines. The 1.5.0.1, 1.5.0.2, and 1.5.0.3 releases have all come from VMs.