TFS 2010 Team Lab Quick Start

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Wendell Phillips has been working on the TFS 2010 beta for some time now. Today he brings us this post about Team Lab.

-Trevor

 

 

The setup steps necessary for Team Lab may appear to be quite complex, but they really aren’t. There are a few pieces to get installed and going, but it really isn’t that bad.

Let’s talk about what you need and why you need it and you will soon be a Team Lab expert.

1. Windows Server 2008 (or R2) with Hyper-V (a “Host”) and one or more Virtual Machines running inside it. Of course the whole point of TFS 2010 Team Lab is to facilitate testing. Team Lab can manage physical devices as well as Virtual Devices, but the real “coolness” of Team Lab is how it can manage virtual machines used in testing. Team Lab can manage a grouping of virtual machines as an “Environment”, set them up for you, test on them, return results and reset the “environment “ for another round of testing.

2. System Center Virtual Machine Manager R2 (SCVMM), a tool to manage the virtual machines and environments hosted on your Hyper-V server. This tool is consists of two parts, the server and the administration console for the server. The server portion uses a SQL database instance to store configuration information; either an existing one or it will set up SQL Express as it is installed.

3. Team Foundation Server 2010 with Visual Studio Lab Manager provides the place to collect, store and manipulate your Test and Build data. You also need to install the SCVMM administration console on the TFS Application Tier so that TFS can talk to the SCVMM server.

4. Microsoft Test Manager is the client software that brings it all together. It creates and controls the test configurations you need for your application(s).

5. Build, Test and Lab agents are needed on the virtual machines. Agents are the communication enablers that allow the VM to generate builds and tests and report results back to TFS and Microsoft Test Manager.

There are details to consider for reach of the steps above that are covered in the MSDN documentation, but the few steps above will get you going.

-- Wendell