As we migrate from permanent agent notes towards various types of dynamic agents, one of the challenges has been handling varying tool locations across this fleet of VMs. Jenkins has global tool locations (under /configureTools) and permanent agent nodes can have their own (under /computer/

/configure), but Azure VM templates do not support this – meaning the only way to configure tool locations for Azure agents is to rely on the global tool configuration in Jenkins centrally.

This would work adequately, but for the fact that the vSphere Cloud plugin, while it does allow tool locations to be configured, does not reload them from previously saved configurations (meaning they are wiped out by any save of the Jenkins configuration, unless explicitly set each time), per JENKINS-41428.

The ideal would be if the vSphere Cloud plugin were fixed, but in the meantime, it would be very nice if the Azure VM Agents plugin offered the capability to save per-template tool locations as well. This would allow us to configure tool locations for vSphere agents as the global tool configuration, override it for permanent nodes, and also override it for Azure VM agents. As it is, we must continually reconfigure and resave the vSphere tool locations every time, if we're to be able to use both "cloud" plugins.

As background, the reason this is necessary in the first place is because of the varying ways MSBuild 2017 gets installed under the Program Files (x86) folders in Windows.