Bjørn Bjerkeli has a post on considerations for host OS when building a Continious Integration server. He echoes our experiences exactly, except for the Windows part. We never tried that one, which seems to be quite lucky. 🙂 Our (and partly his) experiences include:
- Using VmWare helps you be a lot more flexible with your hardware. It also helps when testing stuff on your local machine before rolling it out. We get high loads (which means every inch of the hardware is utilized), but I’m not sure it would be much lower on a native Linux installation.
- You don’t want the machine to be hidden away in some deep server room. Something will fail, and you don’t want to go through all the loops acquiring access. This is of course a trade off, but in my experience the most unbelievable stuff will go wrong.
- He says that if you’re using Windows you will need a full time person, but running Linux is no breeze either. We’re doing Fitnesse and Watir runs continuously too, and I don’t know how much of that Bjerkeli is doing, but that certainly does create a whole lot of things that can go wrong. Think app servers, database servers, CI server, Watir runners (multiples on most of it).
My choice of Linux flavor would be Debian, but there’s not a whole lot of difference with Ubuntu I guess.