Symbiotic or is that a Schizophrenic relationship?

The new Visual Studio Lab Management Guidance and an upgrade to the Visual Studio Virtual Machine (VM) Factory projects shipped last month. What may not be apparent at a first glance, is that the Visual Studio Lab Management Guidance project makes use of the Visual Studio Virtual Machine (VM) Factory project using two special task sequences to automatically and consistently build two Lab Management focused images:

• Lab Management Hands-on-Lab image task sequence defines an all-up demonstration environment for lab management. It is based on the x64 TFS base image, but also contains Active Directory, DHCP and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM). DHCP is fully configured, but disabled for security reasons. SCVMM and Visual Studio Lab Management are both completely configured and will only require that you add a domain-joined Hyper-V host to the default host group in SCVMM.
• Lab Management base image task sequence is useful to create images to test your software using Visual Studio Lab Management. It defines an image based on Windows Server 2008 R2 and installs Visual Studio Test Agent, VS Test Controller, VS Lab Management Agent and Visual Studio TFS Build Service. Most test configurations will need a combination of these agents.

What’s coming with the next factory update?

• We are working on an article tentatively called “Visual Studio ALM Rangers – Rise of the VM Factory”, which will hopefully position the Virtual Machine factory and reduce the fear-factor around this exciting technology.
• We are including support for
  • The Team Foundation Server Service Pack 1, as mentioned in Brian’s blog: TFS 2010 SP1 Cumulative Update 1 Available
  • MOSS2010 and improving the MOSS configuration in general.
• We are resolving a number of bugs we picked up during dog fooding.