Visual Studio Lab Management team blog

In an effort to reduce the number of places you need to search for ALM Content including Diagnostics, Testing and Lab Management we are combining these blogs to one location: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudioalm/ Come on over tell us what you...

Brian Keller has published a Virtual Machine with Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview bits and described 6 hands-on-labs that can be tried in that virtual machine. In this blog post, I will show how you can use the same virtual machine in order to try...

The Developer Preview that was released in Sep 2011 has a set of new features for Lab Management. Brian Harry has recently blogged about those features. The new addition in the Developer Preview is that of "Standard Environments". You can now quickly...

I will try to address today a common query by lot of users of Visual Studio Lab Management on how to correctly run tests in different Lab Environments. This requirement can be achieved by making the test code read the Server names/other configuration...

Have an idea for the product and wondering what is the best way to report it? Think something is missing and you believe it absolutely has to be there? Well, we now have an avenue for you to add and vote for your favorite suggestions. The UserVoice...

The ALM Rangers team has produced a comprehensive guidance for Visual Studio Lab Management .This guidance has dedicated chapters for topics such as setting up and planning a lab, creating environments, and maintaining environments. If you have questions...

A QFE for Visual Studio 2010 testing tools, which fixes some important issues faced by customers, is now available.The full list of issues fixed by this QFE can be found here and you can download this patch here . Note that Service Pack 1 (Visual Studio...

One of the common issues regularly faced by our users is how to test their application in both IE and Firefox. Visual Studio Lab Management can help in solving this issue for automated Coded UI test as part of Lab E2E Workflow flow. To accomplish this...

Both Visual Studio Lab Management 2010 and Visual Studio Lab Management 2010 SP1 work with the Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 hosts. Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 includes new features such as dynamic memory, which are great for test labs. Dynamic memory increases...

UPDATE: In Visual Studio 11, we have introduced rich support for creating physical environments (called as Standard Environments) and running build-deploy-test workflows on them. Check this blog post for details and to get started: http://blogs.msdn.com...

Once you create/compose a virtual environment, you can connect to it for doing manual testing etc. Environment Viewer can offer you a Host based or a Guest based connection, depending on various scenarios. Refer to this MSDN article for details: http...

We get a lot of questions around the support matrix for Lab Management in TFS 2010 – does it only work for Hyper-V virtual machines or with physical machines too? Can I use it with my non-Hyper-V VMs? I will first talk about the types of environments...

If you haven’t noticed already, we have updated the lab management videos to add a narration and have also uploaded them on msdn as part of the ‘How Do I’ series. This makes the videos a lot easier to view and to follow. There are 7 videos in all – an...

As you may be aware, Lab Management GDR is now available . In sync with this release, I am happy to announce that the VM Prep Tool for Visual Studio Lab Management 2010 GDR in now available at http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/vslabmgmt . What’s...

We are happy to announce that the General Distribution Release for lab management in Visual Studio 2010 is now available. A couple of weeks back, we announced the general availability of lab management, licensing changes, and what’s changed since RC....

Today, at the Visual Studio Live event in Seattle, Dave Mendlen – Senior Director of Developer Marketing at Microsoft announced the final release of Lab Management in the Visual Studio 2010 release. We are announcing the general availability of the Lab...

Visual Studio Lab Management 2010 setup guidelines explains the steps required for first time setup and configuration of Host group and Library share in Virtual Machine Manager server to enable the scenarios that is required for Lab management to work...

Updated 7/16/2012: Please note this an archived post and the Lab Management VHD has been retired and been removed from the Microsoft Downloads site. ...

In continuation with our topology series, this time we will pick a topology with multiple ATs, DTs and with Lab Environments joined to different domain for discussion. We will touch upon Lab Management specific requirements and configuration for this...

[Last updated on: Jan 3, 2011] As you plan to adopt VS Lab Management 2010 for managing your labs, you will probably have several questions on your mind such as: How many servers do I need? What kinds of servers should I buy? ...

In this Part3 of this topology blog series, we will talk about a topology that has TMG proxy and with application tiers being load balanced with Windows NLB. We will also touch upon testing with Lab Environments that has one of their tiers (DB tier for...

Note: Cross posted from Nothing geeky... . Permalink In one of the earlier post , we saw how to customize the E2E workflow to automatically create a bug on hitting a test failure. This post enhances the scenario further by taking a snapshot of the...

Note: Cross posted from Nothing geeky... . Permalink The Lab management end-to-end workflow works leverages the Team Foundation Build Agent/Build Controllers to do the deployment. Given that build agent is primarily targeted for compiling sources...

In Part1 of this blog series, we talked about a topology which had a load balancer and multiple application tiers, and also had the test network which has explicit firewall settings to control the test traffic flowing in and out of test network. In...

In order to deploy your build and run your tests on a virtual environment, you need to enable the workflow and testing capabilities of the environment. To successfully configure these capabilities, you need to understand a few concepts and how different...