I had a conversion with a Brian last week about our build server for Tourney Logic, and he off-handedly asked why we don't buy a development server for all of our projects at NuSoft. I got to thinking about that, and it really is a good idea. Every time we start a project, we scramble to get a dev server up and running, starting from actually finding one. For example, I just went to Dell's site and configured a 1U server with pretty nice specs for less than $1,000. And you wouldn't have to buy one every time, because projects eventually end, and that server could get re-imaged and put back into the server queue.

But what about space? I found a rack that will hold 44 1U servers for less than $500. That's a lot of projects. Yes, you'd probably need a switch to manage them too. So it's not a no-cost solution - probably around $45,000-$50,000 to be able to manage 40 or 50 projects. Expensive, but not excessive.

Now, what could you do with the server? Well, first, each installation would have it's own source repository, as well as continuous integration. The image would have a full-blown development environment preconfigured, even having the ccnet.config file in source control set up to monitor itself, and automatically reinitialize CCNet if your config file changes (allowing addition of projects without having to access the build box directly). More on that in another post. It would even come with a VPC base image that, once the project structure is in place, would be loaded on the server, and each developer coming onto the project could just pull that VPC down and be ready to work on that project. Just keep that image relatively up to date, and getting developers ready to start working on your project is a breeze.

Who knows. Maybe a better solution would be a couple of huge servers, and Virtual Server.