Jenkins / CI/CD Runner Servers

Build farms are bursty workloads — long idle periods interrupted by intense bursts of compilation, testing, and packaging. We stock servers tuned for build agents: high core count Xeon Gold/Silver, lots of RAM (for parallel compilation), and fast NVMe SSDs (for git clones, artifact uploads).

Typical Jenkins agent: Dell PowerEdge R650 or HPE ProLiant DL360 Gen10 with dual Xeon Silver 4314 (16c each), 128 GB RAM, 4× 960 GB NVMe SSDs in RAID-0 (build artifacts are ephemeral). A single agent handles 8-16 concurrent build jobs depending on parallelism settings.

For Docker-based builds (BuildKit, kaniko, ko), prefer larger RAM and more local storage — Docker image layers consume disk fast. For Java / Maven builds, prefer high RAM (Maven dependency resolution is memory-hungry). For C/C++ / Rust builds, prefer high core count (`make -j` and `cargo build -j` scale linearly).

GitLab Runner / GitHub self-hosted runner / TeamCity all work the same way on our hardware. Many shops run a hybrid: 1 controller server + 4-8 agent servers. Refurbished hardware lets you spin up an 8-agent farm for under $20K vs $80K+ cloud VM costs over 3 years.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many CPU cores does a Jenkins build agent need?

Depends on build parallelism. For typical CI/CD workloads (linting, unit tests, integration tests), 16 cores handles 4-8 concurrent jobs comfortably. For C++ / Rust / Linux kernel builds, 32-64 cores reduces wall-clock build time significantly because compilation parallelizes well.

Should I run Jenkins agents in containers or VMs?

Containers (Docker, Kubernetes pods) for ephemeral build jobs — clean state every build, fast spin-up. VMs for long-running jobs or complex multi-step pipelines that need stable state. Most modern CI/CD platforms favour container-based agents (GitLab Runner with Docker executor, GitHub self-hosted with container runners).

How much RAM does a build server need?

Java/Maven builds: 8-16 GB per concurrent job. Docker builds: 2-4 GB per concurrent job. C++ builds (large codebases): 16-32 GB per concurrent job. Multiplying jobs concurrency × per-job RAM = host RAM requirement. 64-128 GB RAM is typical for 8-job-concurrency agents.

Can I run Jenkins on refurbished hardware?

Yes — Jenkins is platform-agnostic, runs identically on new vs. refurbished Dell, HPE, Lenovo. Many shops run Jenkins controller + 4-8 build agents on a refurbished cluster — saves $50-80K vs. cloud-based CI minutes over 3 years.

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