Deployment Only Servers - Do they need windows or can we use linux?
Morning Everyone,
We're planning a major shake up in our build envirnoment and plan to create some VM's to do some of our building (along side 2 physical machines). As part of this we're considering having deloyment only VM's to push the software to Steam etc. I was looking at all the costs and wondered if we could run these in linux?
Here's my idea;
Build Machine 1 - Windows
Build Machine 2 - Windows
VM-Build-Machine - Windows (backup build machine, virtualised)
VM-Build Machine 2 - Windows (32 core, 64GB, 4070GPU,using half the available load of a threadripper machine)
VM-Build Machine 3 - Windows (Same as above)
VM-Deploy 1 - Windows (Same machine, 4 cores, 8 GB Ram)
VM-Deploy 2 - same as above
VM-Deploy 3 - Same as above
Since those deploy machines just push the files to steam etc do they need to be windows? Having them as linux would save us a few £100 a year on license?
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Hi Nathan,
TeamCity Server and its agents can run on both Linux and Windows. Since they are Java applications, they are not tied to a specific operating system. You can find more details about the supported platforms and environments in this article.
Agent licenses are not tied to a particular OS either, so there is no difference in license cost between Windows and Linux agents. This article covers most questions about how TeamCity licensing works.
If what you meant is that you could save £100 a year by renting Linux VMs instead of Windows VMs for your deployment machines, then absolutely. The choice of OS for your agents is completely up to you. If some of your agents don’t require Windows-specific tooling, running them on Linux could indeed be the more cost-effective option.
What i was thinking, was we build the games on the Build-Machines-# and then pass the artifacts to the deployment servers for deployment to the gaming platfroms (steam/gog/epic etc). So the build machines would be windows as they need the tooling for the builds but since the deployment servers are just uploading data they don't really care about that stuff and could run on linux (meaning i don't have to buy windows licenses)
Oh, you meant Windows licenses. I see.
Yeah, that should work just fine. You will just need to configure Artifact and likely Snapshot dependencies to configure the build chain. And then you can use Agent Requirements to restrict the deploy builds to Linux machines.