The Team Foundation Server 11 Developer Preview introduces a number of simplifications and enhancements in Lab Management. The primary one you will notice in the developer preview is the introduction of ‘Standard environments’. Here is a brief summary of what Standard environments are and what you can do with them.
Ever since we released Lab Management we’ve gotten feedback from a segment of our customers that they love the Lab Management promise but aren’t ready to bite off SCVMM & Hyper-V. Some people use VMWare other just want to just automate the physical machines they use today. Standard environments now enable more flexibility, allowing you to use VMWare, physical machines, etc.
Standard environments help you quickly get started with testing on multi-machine environments and to be able to run functional automated tests as part of continuous integration cycle. You can get started with creating standard environments the day you setup your TFS. You do not need to setup Hyper-V servers or configure System Center Virtual Machine Manager in TFS. With standard environments, the whole process of creating an environment is a matter of a few simple steps.
1. Configure a test controller for your team project collection. All projects within the collection can share this controller. Or, you can scale up by adding more controllers.
2. Let us say you want to setup a 2-machine environment for running post-build automated tests – a client running Windows 7, and a server running Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 to act as the web server and database server. Have these machines provisioned from wherever is the norm in your enterprise – this could be your IT managed lab, VMWare VMs, physical machines, or anything. Install the pre-requisites needed for your application on these machines.
3. From the Lab Center in Microsoft Test Manager, run the wizard to create a new Standard environment. As part of this wizard, specify the names of the machines from (2) above, and an administrator credential to connect to those machines. If you want to run Coded-UI tests as part of automation, then select that option in the ‘Advanced’ tab of the wizard.
4. That’s all you have to do in order to create an environment. You will notice that a test agent automatically gets downloaded and installed in all machines of the environment. This is the only agent that is needed in Version 11 of Lab Management in order to deploy builds or run tests. At the end of the creation process, your environment should be "Ready" for use.
5. Ensure that you have a test plan with automated tests as well as a test settings to run those tests on the environment.
6. Create a build definition using Visual Studio Ultimate 11 Developer Preview and choose LabDefaultTemplate.11.xaml as the template. This is the new build-deploy-test automation template that allows you to select a standard environment for running your automation.
7. Queue the new build, and see how the automation runs on the environment.
To summarize, the whole process of installing agents and preparing an environment that is ready for build verification is done with a few clicks. You do not need to setup SCVMM environments in order to use build-deploy-test automation features. A ‘standard’ environment will suffice.
Of course, SCVMM environments are still supported, and have been enhanced as well to support auto-installation of agents. With SCVMM environments, you get the additional benefits of using snapshots as part of your testing scenarios.
Here are a few common questions that you might be seeking answers to:
1. The Developer preview of Lab Management does not yet support Windows 8 Servers, Windows 8 guests, or SCVMM 2012 Release Candidate. Support for these is in the works.
2. The whole process of auto-installing the agent and configuring it is streamlined only for domain-joined machines (that have a trust relationship with Test Controller) in standard environments. If you are using workgroup machines in standard environments, you still have to setup shadow accounts.
3. The only supported operating systems for machines to be used in standard environments are Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 SP2, Windows Server 2008 R2, and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1.
For more information, see: MSDN documentation.
Brian
What about Linux/Unix environments? We use TEE and we want to look at using Lab Management for our linux and unix environments especially with Oracle.
Brian, I see that the advantages of using SCVMM environments is being mentioned, specifically "With SCVMM environments, you get the additional benefits of using snapshots as part of your testing scenarios.
Will TFS Lab Management 11 provide feature parity with the snapshot on VMWare environments, without questionable codeplex hacks/power tools for VMWare environments?
We use VMWare,so without support for snapshots, most of the benefits of lab management are lost.
If there won't be support for VMWare snapshots, will TFS Lab Management 11 in the box provide the ability to use Windows System Restore Points(again without questionable codeplex hacks/power tools)? windows.microsoft.com/…/Create-a-restore-point
At this time, neither is supported. We're exploring how we can add support for VMWare snapshots in some form but it's not clear to me what this will look like.
Brian
Bummer that there won't be feature parity with VMWare. Guess we'll have to continue to use other stacks for our virtualization needs.
@NWeirich I think that you're missing the point. TFS Lab Management has better integration (i.e. snapshot support) when used with Hyper-V instead of VMWare.
. that's my point exactly. Hyper-V isn't the industry best hyper-visor platform. Take a look at VSphere and you'll see that it's atleast 2-3 years ahead of MS. It's unfortunate and misguided that the TFS team does not provide native support in TFS Lab Management for the industry leading virtualization platform.
What about running manual tests on Physical Lab?
yes, you can run manual tests on a physical enviroment in Lab Management.
Brian, Are you addressing the following issues in TFS server vNext?:
1. Ability rename team projects
2. Ability/ease of changing templates used by team projects
3. Ability to move source code (history) from one team project to another?
Any one of those features would make keeping tfs server up to date as we move foreward with new versions. Right now I am stuck with projects created in TFS2008 (upgraded to TFS2010) that don't work with new products like Urban Turtle and the upgrade process I can find seems very complicated and quite frankly scares me that I might lose something if it fails.
1) I would very much like to fix this and it's very high on our backlog but it's an ugly problem and we haven't gotten to it yet.
2) Yes, that will be improving some in our next release. Still not ideal but better.
3) You can do that now. If you branch your code from one project to another you'll be able to see the history from the new project.
Brian
On #3. I have done that (Created new team project as a branch of the source controld directory) and the history only goes as far back as the branch, unless I am missing an option somewhere to turn it on.
Robert, I think that you're running into a limitation that we have for folder history. In the case of folder history in VS, we always show recursive history (that is, the rollup of all changesets for all items below that folder). For performance reasons, we cannot also show history across branches for recursive history, so you'll see the history "end" at the branch.
There are two options to work around this:
1. Run history on the files you're interested in, and you'll see a "+" next to the branch. Expanding this history at this point will allow you to see history prior to the team project creation.
2. Use the command line to show a non-recursive history for folders you want to see history on prior to the branch/team project creation. Note that this will only show history for the folder itself, not the items in it.
Matt
Matt, the problem with your suggestion is that when we delete the old team project the history of the moved team project is also lost, there's no + to follow the history back to the original team project because the orginal team project is deleted.
What we want is a way to MOVE (yes actually MOVE) the history and all of the metadata(I'm looking at annotions) to a new team project and then remove/delete/destroy the old team project and still retain the history and all of the metadata from the original team project in the new team project. Does this make sense?
It's also very troubling and doesn't instill confidence in the slightest that the history is available to be seen on folders…but not on the actual items themselves. That seems like a really weak implementation/design.
Robert, can you contact me directly? I'd like to understand your scenario more in depth. My email address is mmitrik at microsoft dot com
Thanks!
Are there any plans to include Azure environments under lab manager. I would like to deploy my application to one or more Azure subscriptions run my test scripts and then teardown the environments.
Another useful feature would be to identify a subscription to populate with load test agents able to run codedUI tests and pre-installed with various browsers.
Are there are plans to allow Lab management to create environments on clustered hosts through SCVMM? This would be a really useful feature!
Yes, we've enabled that in TFS 11.
Bran
Is it going to be possible to have both VMs and physical machines in a single test environment?
Nick – you can have a single standard environment that wraps both physical machines and virtual machines into the same environment. Hope that helps
Is it difficult to support snapshots with VMWare or is it a strategic decision to push HyperV?
If it is the former, then why is it difficult? If it is a matter of taking snapshots and being able to go back to a snapshot, then VMWare supports it anyway doesn't it? In which case isn't it a case of hooking into the right points in some form of a Lab Management API to execute the equivalent for VMWare or any virtualisation platform for that matter?
Does TFS 2012 lab management support clustered Hyper-V hosts with SCVMM 2012 and VMM2012 SP1?
@Ted, yes.
Brian