Lab Management coming to Visual Studio Team System 2010 (Channel 9)

Today at TechEd Barcelona, Jason Zander announced that Visual Studio Team System 2010 will feature a brand new Lab Management capability to help organizations raise the bar on software quality. Lab Management will integrate with the rest of the Visual Studio to help testers more easily test a variety of configurations in a virtual lab environment, and help developers more easily repro bugs by delivering snapshots of those virtualized environments after bugs are discovered. I had a chance to sit down with Ram Cherala and Vinod Malhotra to get an in-depth look at how this will work.

This "Humanized Screencast" is best viewed at fullscreen using the high-quality WMV download.

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PerfectPhase "This is not war, this is pest control!" - Dalek to Cyberman

Nov 11, 2008 at 11:02 AM

Looks really helpful, a few quick questions:

Where can I get my hands on it to try

Does it make a complete copy of the virtual machine or does it used linked clones, seems to take a long time to set up the test machines.

If I have Virtual machine manager 2008 installed, can I use my ESX servers as well as Hyper-V?

Does it support multimonitor, can I open connections to each VM on different monitors?

Where are the images stored, I kind of got the impression that there would be VM going into TFS, which would be a really space issue!

And finally can I create an environment add machines and then template all the machines as a whole?
DaveCl

Nov 11, 2008 at 5:39 PM

Did you see this integration into Visual Studio from Skytap (screencast): http://blog.skytap.com/2008/10/visual-studio-team-system-screencast/

They already provide Virtual Lab Management and it's available as an on-demand cloud service over the web, so you can get going with this technology today without having to invest in lab infrastructure
Vinod Malhotra

Nov 12, 2008 at 10:43 AM

>> Does it make a complete copy of the virtual machine or does it used linked clones, seems to take a long time to set up the test machines.

For now, when an environment is copied back and forth from the library, we do make complete copies. We plan to use linked clones (differencing disks) as an additional option in the future. For filing bugs, you can just use checkpoints and do not have to make complete copies.

>> If I have Virtual machine manager 2008 installed, can I use my ESX servers as well as Hyper-V?

Yes, since Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) 2008 abstracts virtualization platform for Lab Manager. There will be certain limitation with ESX though.

>> Does it support multimonitor, can I open connections to each VM on different monitors?

Yes! You can launch mutiple instances of Lab Environment Viewer (LEV) and simultaneously interact with different VMs in different instances of LEV on different monitors.

>> Where are the images stored, I kind of got the impression that there would be VM going into TFS, which would be a really space issue!

The VM images are stored in library servers managed by VMM, not in TFS.

>> And finally can I create an environment add machines and then template all the machines as a whole?

Yes, you can templatize an already created multi-tier environment.
santosh_b Benjy

Nov 13, 2008 at 4:38 AM

Excellent stuff. Really looking forward to the release of this. Keep up the great work.
PerfectPhase "This is not war, this is pest control!" - Dalek to Cyberman

Nov 14, 2008 at 10:19 AM

Thanks for the reply, really looking forward to getting my hands on this!
mj.liu

Feb 10, 2009 at 1:25 AM

Looking forward
mikeblake

Apr 29, 2009 at 2:08 AM

Hello there,

We are currently using VMWare to rollback and perform nightly tests. The drawback is after a month, the VM 'expires'. Has Microsoft thought this through? Do you support Kerbros etc? Are there any workarounds?

http://forum.sysinternals.com/forum_posts.asp?TID=7129

Thanks
mblake at imeta.co.uk
prasannap

Apr 30, 2009 at 3:13 PM

Excellent Demo, looking forward to see latest bits to play with. Can you please let us know on your web-site (if you have one) what are the basic requirements to get this up-and-running

In you demo when you created check-point, is there anyways user can provide CUSTOM name to it insted of system generated name (this is a feature request from me)

It sounded like TFS is a must for this product to report BUGs or we can use our bug system? As far as I know TFS is expensive, so what options we have to avoid TFS?
landrys

Jul 29, 2009 at 6:42 AM

It's just me or the video is not available?

Thanks to check!