Hi,

I’m a newbie with Lab Management and I try to figure how it can help me after reading the chapter 16.

I have a traditional development and production environment. I mean, we develop on workstation, graduate to first test server, graduate on second test server, then on pre production server and finally on production server. Some servers are virtual machine and some are physical (production).

I don’t want to use Lab Management to create virtual server, they already exist.

Is Lab Management can help me to automate my deployment process on these servers from the first one to the production server?

Thank you, Eric

Hi Rick,

Without knowing more about how you "graduate" from server to server it's hard to say whether or not Lab Management would help you. But think of Lab Management as being useful for automating a build->deploy->test workflow. Hence you can automate regular builds (e.g. nightly builds) and script those to deploy out to one or more virtual environments (each one can consist of one or more virtual machines). From there you can run a series of automated tests, and snapshot the VM at various points in time (e.g. "Friday night's build" or "Bug 512 repro"). For this to work you will need to populate your VM library with Hyper-V VM's. If you're using virtual server today you'll need to migrate those VM's.

You can do the same with physical machines but you don't get the snapshot capabilities.

Brian

The test environments are virtual machines and many teams are deploying different WEB applications on it. So, I don’t have full control to on these environments and they are installed and managed by another support team. Maybe I can consider these environments like “physical” in Lab Management if I want to automate the deployment.

Eric

Yes, you could certainly treat it that way. You of course wouldn't benefit from Lab Management being able to restore/persist snapshots, but you could setup build and test automation.

Brian

I have to review the deploying process for all these environments. Now we are using a home made application to do it. Basically, this application controls all DLL copy on the server and the application configuration setting. Do you know a third party tool good to automat this process with VS2010/TFS other than Lab Management?

Without knowing what your requirements are it's impossible to say. There are hundreds if not thousands of applications, tools, utilities, etc. which fall into the category of "deployment." My personal preference is MSDeploy but this assumes you're using IIS.

Scott Hanselman has an excellent presentation on this here:
http://live.visitmix.com/MIX10/Sessions/FT14

Brian

Hi,

You just write before we need to use Lab Management with Hyper-V.

Does Lab Management support ESX (WMWare)?

In PDC2008, Microsoft was planning to support it.
Look at: http://mschnlnine.vo.llnwd.net/d1/pdc08/PPTX/TL37.pptx

But I don't find any thing on it now!

Thank you,

Eric

PDC content represents a very forward-looking view at Microsoft's roadmap, which is always subject to change. At this time Microsoft has not announced any timeframe for supporting VMWare with their Lab Managemnet offering. You can still achieve several pieces of the Lab Management story using VMWare (such as automating your test runs) but you won't have access to take/restore snapshots and other such features.

Brian

Thank you!

Considering VMWare virtual machine as a physical machine, what can we do, what do we lost using Lab Management?

End of chapter 16 has not a lot of details about Lab Management and physical environment.

I understand we can:
- automate testing with test agent
- collect diagnostic data
- define test setting

We cannot:
- Recover environment from snapshot before deployment
- Snap shot environment during manual testing
- Use Environment Viewer (need to use technologies as Remote Desktop)

Can we?
- Deploy
- Automate build, deploy and test process (without snap shot)

Thank you!

Eric

Hi Eric,

Your list is absolutely correct.

You can achieve deployment (and hence automated build -> deploy -> test) but there isn't a wizard with Team Build for doing so. You'd need to do this manually. I know some of the guys from the Lab Management team were working on a blog post which would describe how this works in more detail but it's not ready yet.

If you don't mind, can you please start a new thread in the MSDN forums for Lab Management? http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/For.../vslab/threads

I'm getting ready to go on the road for several weeks and won't be able to monitor this forum. If you post your question and ask for guidance on how to set this up as a physical environment I'm betting somebody can give you some more pointers faster than I would be able to since I'll be travelling.

Brian Keller