Several of us at Calxeda have been working on extensions to lava-dispatcher with an eye toward using it as a general test management engine not just for individual platforms, but for whole clusters of machines as well. We've broken our extensions into three feature branches, which can be found at https://code.launchpad.net/~david-schwarz:

ssh_qemu_clients: Adds SSH and QEMU clients to lava-dispatcher, along with some infrastructure changes to make running dispatcher actions more independent of client type. We also provide example scripts and configurations for each type of client.

result-reporting: Adds the notion of a test_action, which determines and reports test results independently of lava-test. We considered something like this necessary to enable coordinated tests running on groups of machines, because lava-test is necessarily a single platform utility.

multi-target: Allows a single instance of lava-dispatcher to run coordinated actions concurrently on an arbitrary number of target machines. A couple of short sample job scripts are provided.

We'd be interested in any feedback anyone has about these features, our implementations, etc.

Thanks, David Schwarz Calxeda, Inc. Austin, TX