The Jenkins UI can also be tailored to help in managing installations that require a large numbers of Slave hosts. This may be required to improve the performance of builds or test runs by distributing the load to other systems, or wherever Jenkins is used to perform functions spanning a multiple-host Operating System—something that Jenkins can do very easily through the built-in JNLP functionality.
Often, testing requirements dictate that a wide variety of different nodes running varying combinations of OSes and software are essential—this is common when you have an application that needs testing on different versions of Internet Explorer; each version requires a different Windows host, as each host can only support one version of the browser at a time.
Managing multiple and varying Slave Nodes can be problematic; however, the Jenkins UI provides several features that can help to simplify and automate this aspect.
One of the simplest approaches to manage...