Is there a way to give different groups priority access to resources?
I have a cluster that is shared between different user groups. I would like the resources (agent machines) to be used by everyone by default, but if a user from a group that bought a part of the cluster machines starts a build I want those machines to be dedicated to that build.
Best Answer
You can use resource pools to create groups of machines to be used for different purposes. You set up the pools in the cluster manager (under the Agents tab usgin the Resources sub tab). When starting emake you would use the --emake-resource option to pick that set of machines. Machines can be in different pools.
This will not really address your request though, as there won't be any sharing between different groups if you assign agents to completely separate resources. What you can do though is reserve a subset of machines to only be available to specific users. Keep in mind that agent sharing in the cluster manager is set up to ensure fairness and best performance. So in most cases the need to ensure fairness between different groups isn't a big issue, as things even out over time. As of EA 6.1 there is a minimal chargeback reporting capability built in, which allows for measuring of use by users.
Assume I have 30 agent servers, I create resouce R20 to include 20 servers (s1 to s20) and I create resource R30 to inlcude 30 servers (s1 to s30). In other words, servers (s1 to s20) are included in two resources (R20 and R30).
Then I divide my users to two groups, one group uses resource R20 and the other uses resource R30 (via build class or --emake-resource).
Is this setting OK? Or is there any drawback/risk in this setting?
You need to tell us what your goal is though, or we can't have any further discussion on whether your setting is valid. This thread discussion is focusing on the new "priority pool" resource manager - you can reserve your own pool of hosts whenever you have builds running, but if you don't use it, you want others to utilize your hosts since they are idle...
This seems to be exactly one of our use cases for our "priority pool" resource manager. Please refer to our documentation for two use cases for this specific resource manager. The only missing feature as of the latest EA version is, there is no security check for using any specific resource. That means, every user can use any resource defined in the cluster manager.
