While the sheer number of machines in my previous post surprised all of us, its more interesting to note that its not enough. Its simply just not enough. Even today, we’re constantly under the gun, bringing new machines online as fast as possible.

• The 30 machines marked idle/waiting-to-mothball will all be recycled and used for blocked projects that need machines.
• Justin’s group recently brought another VMware host online, and built out extra disk space so we have space to create 30+ new VMs – 6 new VMs are coming online this week, additional to whats listed in previous blog.
• We’re ordering another batch of 80 mac minis, as we’ve already used up the previous batch of 50 minis, after we used the initial batch of 30 minis.

We hope its enough machines for a while.

Never mind the cost of all these machines. Pretend they were all free.

All of these machines need rented colo rack space, network bandwidth, electricity, a/c, humans to install and support them, humans to configure them up and bring them online. In a ripple-on effect, the more builds we produce, the more diskspace and infrastructure we need for ftp, downloads, virus scanning, tinderbox servers, etc.

Thats just to have them come online. Then starts the human time for the constant care and feeding that each of these unique individual machines need. For one or two machines, its easy. When you look at 200 machines, and then an additional 150 or so machines, its a no-brainer that this approach does not scale.