VSTS Rangers Project - Virtualized Deployment of TFS | VSTS: Status Update 1

  • Article

As promised and previously mentioned, we are pursuing complete transparency in terms of the VSTS rangers projects. I am herewith sharing with you, the outcome of the first status meeting, during which we agreed on scope, deliverables and milestones … with the proviso that you use the information as transparent awareness, not binding commitments.

Clipart Illustration of a White Person Shouting OFFER Through A Megaphone, Symbolizing Job Opportunities And SalesSee VSTS Rangers Project Summary for more details on this and other initiatives. It is, however, important to re-iterate our objectives for this strategic initiative as some confusion and dust has been whirled up in recent discussions. Our objectives are the (1) consolidation and delivery of guidance around the deployment of VSTS and TFS in a virtual environment, (2) the creation of base sample images based on the guidance, (3) guidance and tools to support the automation of the creation of virtual environments and (4) the inclusion of non-Microsoft Virtualization hosting technologies.

So what scope and deliverables will be in the magic delivery?

Scope

The proposed scope now includes the following:

  • Core
    • Guidance & Recommendations for
      • TFS Virtualization
      • VSTS Virtualization
      • Widgets Virtualization
      • Non-Microsoft Virtualization applicable to
        • TFS 2010
        • VSTS 2010
    • Virtualization Automation
  • Exceeded
    • Virtualization Automation
    • Factory Setup

Deliverables

The deliverables are unchanged:

  • Core
    • Guidance
    • Samples, based on guidance, such as:
      • base TFS 2010 VM
      • base VSTS 2010 VM
      • base TFS & VSTS 2010 VM
  • Exceeded
    • Guidance and automation scripts, i.e. PowerShell for creation of customer/production ready images

Your feedback would be appreciated whether we should be shipping VirtualPC and/or Hyper-V images in terms of the sample base VMs. Which flavour or flavours would add value to your environment? The first tactical edition for internal dog fooding will be hyper-v based, however, we are going to focus on any other flavours needed by “you” in our final deliverables.

Milestones

The milestones are probably not to be included in this post, as we do not want the challenging dates we are pursuing to appear in other blogs and become ‘published’. What we are aiming for is to work with the VSTS 2010 BETA-1 release and ship the guidance long before VSTS 2010 RTM is shipped. The DRAFT bits should therefore start emerging the fourth quarter of this year.

Shout if you have any questions or recommendations for this project. The team of software engineers working on this exciting initiative would appreciate any input that would allow us to make this an even better product for “you”.