ALM Rangers Visual Studio 11 Readiness – Part 4: A small peek at the upcoming Lab Management Guidance

This is part to an exploration of the upcoming ALM Rangers solutions for Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server 11. Previous posts:

• ALM Rangers Visual Studio 11 Readiness – Part 1: A small peek at the upcoming TFS Planning Guide
• ALM Rangers Visual Studio 11 Readiness – Part 2: A small peek at the upcoming TFS Branching and Merging Guidance
• ALM Rangers Visual Studio 11 Readiness – Part 3: A small peek at the upcoming TFS Upgrade Guidance

In this post we are taking a look at the Lab Management Guidance which also delivered a great ALPHA release:

Abstract

Provide practical and scenario-based guidance for Visual Studio Lab Management, backed by VM Factory automation.
Codename: African Hawk Eagle (AHE)

Epics

• I would like to understand the changes and impact of Dev11 on Lab Management
• I would like all feedback and suggestions from the community on v1 addressed

A phenomenal new Hands-on Lab

I had the privilege of reviewing a new hands-on lab in which you will learn how Microsoft Visual Studio Lab Management can be used as the infrastructure for a build, deploy and test process. Visual Studio 11 enhance the product by providing so called Standard Lab Environments, which allows you to set up Lab Management labs without minimum additional infrastructure … this is a great new feature and I had an environment up and running, including build, deploy and test processes in less than an hour.

Four screenshots I took during my evaluation journey …

A summary of changes to date … the team has not been idling

• Built an enhanced Lab Template
• Built a parallel CI Template
• Guidance for the enhanced and parallel CI templates
• Lab Management build activities (10 new activities!)
• Created a new Quick Reference Poster for Lab Management 11
• Created a demo video for the Parallel CI template
• Hands on lab (in time for TR14) on build-deploy-test with TFS11 standard environments
• Updated the v1 guide for VS/TFS11
• Lot of fun and interesting meeting and discussions

Soon to come

• SharePoint deployment guidance
• SQL Server deployment guidance

Great stuff Mathias Olausson and team!

Comments

• Anonymous
  December 27, 2011
  Any chance the guidance will mention running VMWare VMs? Setting up a VM in VM Workstation would be a welcome change to the "HYPER-V, HYPER-V" guidance / Hands on Labs from 2010.

• Anonymous
  December 27, 2011
  Will this include deployments to physical environments? Will upgrading Lab Management 2010 environments to Dev11 environments?

• Anonymous
  December 30, 2011
  AndyC - Even in VS11 (vNext) there is no support for VM-ware when it comes to using the virtualizaion features in lab management (environment templates, snapshot etc). But there will be improved support for physical environments which means that you will be able to create the VMs using VM-ware and then use those VMs in a Lab Management evironment and quickly setup a build-deploy-test workflow. We will cover the latter in the guidance.

• Anonymous
  December 30, 2011
  Mike - The guidance will cover physical lab environments in the context of Visual Studio 11, which adds a concept of standard environment. A standard environment does not require SCVMM or Hyper-V. Microsoft Test Manager will also deploy the test agents automatically to a standard environment. I'm not sure to what extent we will cover the upgrade process, this is something I assume will be documented in the general TFS installation/upgrade documentation.

• Anonymous
  January 02, 2012
  Mathias I understand that there's no official support for VMWare coming in Visual Studio 11. But seriously, you guys are the rangers, and customers like us who are on VMWare need solutions/guidance on how to actually get Lab Management to work completely (snapshots, VSPHERE templates) with VWMare. Otherwise we can't adopt TFS / Lab Management and we have to use other solutions. TFS looks great but until there is guidance VMWARE customers should steer far far away and that is unfortunate because it looks like a really powerful end-to-end story.