VSTS Rangers Projects – Project Announcement: VSTS/TFS Virtualized deployment

This is the second of the three projects for which I am currently the dev lead and which are on the verge of commencing as VSTS Rangers Projects. Included in this post is the motivation, the vision and the objective of the project, whereby I am more than happy to discuss more details with you if needed. For the sake of text re-use, all text indicated in italic has been copy-pasted from the project announcement emails from Bijan:

Motivation

The market for virtualization is booming. This has created a rapidly growing demand for deployment of VSTS and TFS in virtual environments. In the absence of guidance from the product group, many customers have done their best guesses or have involved our field resources to get started in this area.

Vision

Deliver best recommendations for deployment of VSTS and TFS in virtual environments.

Abstract

This project should collect and merge all known best practices and define what is possible today. This guidance is about defining a consensus across the board with all involved parties including the Core Rangers, Extended Rangers and the Product Group. Our goal is to get as close as possible to production ready Hyper-V images. For internal use, we set the goal to create and distribute production level images using corp licenses. For customer engagements, we plan to deliver instructions for creating such images with customer licenses. Automating this process with PowerShell is another goal.

The team, made up of VSTS Core and Extended Rangers, Team System MVPs who are not yet Rangers and for the first time Community leads from SA Architect, working on this project is phenomenal and we are looking forward to keep you informed with the progressed of this project in the future.

    … MVPs and Community Leads

Thanks you guys for accepting the challenge, for sharing your experience, your passion for technology and especially your personal time on this great initiative!