Our team manages many different configurations of Windows, Linux and Mac servers for our automation needs. We would like to leverage a solution like VMWare's vcloud or a homegrown vm provisioning solution where build/test agents are created on the fly during a build. The basic idea is that we would maintain a collection of golden VM images to be used by specific QuickBuild configurations. At the appropriate time in the workflow, we would like QuickBuild to be able to request the allocation of a VM node with the appropriate attributes and then use that node for portions of the build.
We can probably address some of these requirements through a custom plugin, but when new agents are created on demand, they will potentially be using new hostnames and so will be untrusted agents. A couple of new features might be required to allow us to implement this feature:
1) Allow new nodes to authorize themselves automatically, perhaps through an extra form of authentication like a shared key.
2) Allow nodes to register themselves in QuickBuild with attributes and/or resources pre-defined.
We would appreciate your input on the viability of this feature and whether it might be possible with the existing features of QuickBuild.
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