How to healthCheck a resource before it's used
Let's say we have a procedure that we want to run. We create a pool of resources and assign the name of the pool to the resources parameter of the step. Further suppose that a job can leave a resource in an unusable state, for instance, not enough space to build, or NIS is turned off. We would somehow like to run a healthCheck script on the resources, and make sure that only resources that pass the healthCheck are candidates for allocation to the step. Is there a good way to do that?
Note, I created a script to assign the number of checks that fail to a property on the resource, and used the ordering filter to select the resource with the least number of failures. However, I don't want to run that script in broadcast mode against the pool, in case some of the resources in the pool are already in use. I want to run it only against the usable candidates, and only allocate a resource if the healthCheck returns 0 failures.
The only way I can figure to do this is to break the build into a workflow. The first step in the workflow is Allocate. As part of the Allocate, run a health check. If the health check fails, mark the resource, then repeat the Allocate state. The 'mark' is a property on the resource that prevents it from being selected by the ordering filter. It means that another task (separate or part of the workflow) has to be implemented to fix the health check issues and reset the property.
Another way would be to create temporary pools in a first step, maybe within the filter with the "normal" pool.
Then run verification on that sub-pool, and remove the ones that don't fit the requirements, then run the normal procedures/steps on this pool.
Delete it at the end of the job
