Share via

Lab Management

  • Article

[This documentation is for preview only, and is subject to change in later releases. Blank topics are included as placeholders.]

Visual Studio Team System Lab Management is a new member of the Visual Studio Team System 2010 family of products. Lab Management enables you to create, store, and track virtual environments for use in application development, deployment, and testing.

  • Create Multitiered Environments for Developing and Staging Your Application: You can create virtual environments that contain multiple computers and roles for running unit tests when you code a new application. You can also connect to the snapshot of the environment where a defect was found to more easily reproduce the issue. For more information, see Working with Virtual Environments for Development and Lab Management Scenarios.

  • Automatically Deploy Applications to Virtual Environments: You can use Windows workflow to automatically deploy new builds of your application to virtual computers and then run verification tests. For more information, see Define Workflow Builds Using the Default Template and Define Workflow Builds Using a Custom Build Process Template.

  • Create Virtual Environments to Use in Testing Your Application: You can create virtual environments that define the set of roles required to run a specific application and the computers that will be used for each role. These environments, created from clean virtual machine templates and customized to more closely match the target production environment, reduce the time that you have to spend to set up the tests and increase the time that you have available to do the testing. You can also create copies of environments without name conflicts by using network isolation. You can run your test cases on this environment, and, when you discover a difficult problem, attach snapshots of the environment to bug. For more information, see Setting Up Environments to Run Tests or Collect Data Remotely.

Common Tasks

Tasks

Associated Topics

Create the user accounts.

Create virtual machine hosts.

Create virtual machines.

Obtain a licensed copy of System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM).

Install and configure VMM.

Add hosts to a host group.

Install Team Foundation Server.

  • Download the latest version of the Team Foundation Server installation guide from this page on the Microsoft Web site: Microsoft Download Center

  • See the topics "Scenario: Installing for Small Teams (Single-Server Installation)" or "Scenario: Installing Using Existing Infrastructure or More than One Server."

Install the VMM Administrator Console on each Team Foundation Server application-tier.

Add the Team Foundation Server service account to VMM and the VMs. Add the account under which Team Foundation Server is running to the Administrators group on the host computer that is running the virtual machines. Add the account under which Team Foundation Server is running to the user group on VMM.

Configure team project collections to use virtual machine hosts and library shares.

Install and configure test and build controllers

Install a test, build, and lab agents on a virtual machine.

  • A test agent is a background process that receives, runs, and reports on tests and collects data on a single computer. The test agent communicates with test agent controller, usually located on another computer.

  • A build agent is a background process that receives, runs, and reports on Team Foundation Server builds and other property settings on a single computer. The build agent communicates with the build controller, usually located on another computer

  • A lab agent is a background process that runs on a virtual machine to configure, monitor, and report on status and errors. The lab agent communicates with the lab Web service that is running on the Team Foundation Server application tier.

Create virtual machine templates

Create a virtual environment

Back up or restore the resources that are used by Lab Management. When you back up Team Foundation Server, you should also back up the VMM databases and the virtual machines.

Use virtual environments as part of your development: If you want to use the virtual environments to develop the application, your next step is to determine the appropriate configurations and environments.

Use virtual environments as part of your application deployment: If you want to use the virtual to deploy new builds of your application, your next step is to configure the build workflow to copy the binaries to the appropriate locations.

Use virtual environments as part of your testing: If you want to use the virtual environments to test the application, your next step is to plan your testing based on either requirements or user stories. You can link your tests to these requirements or user stories and then plan which are the configurations and environments that you want to use to run these tests.

See Also

Concepts

Administering Team Foundation

Other Resources

VSTS Lab Management team blog