VM Factory … creating consistent VMs with minimal effort. Would you like to know more?

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The Visual Studio ALM Rangers Virtualization Guidance initiative is an ongoing guidance project, which includes the VM Factory.

The VM Factory is part of our Rangers Virtualization guidance. Originally we used the VM Factory to automate the creation and configuration of Rangers images to achieve automation, consistency and a simple VM creation process. With the VM Starter Factory we are enabling everyone who is interested, to spin up their own factory within a few elapsed hours and minimal effort. Once you have an operational factory you can create multiple VMs, based on consistent patterns, with the effort of a few clicks on the keyboard and patience while the factory installs the defined software packages.

Use the Rangers VM patterns, customize the patterns or create your own to automate the creation of VM images … your imagination is the limit to the factory :)

Over the last weekend I created more than a dozen TFS Single Server environments, with all the bells and whistles (prerequisites), for testing and spend probably a grand total of 10min in total specifying the machine names, clicking buttons and configuring TFS in the end. While the factory was huffing and puffing, I was enjoying the weekend and playing soccer with my sons … I love this factory, because it really simplifies the creation of consistent VM environments. The Rangers team, especially our factory master Paul Meyer, have done phenomenal work.

We had a VM Factory “How To” session this morning, afternoon and evening … depending on which time zone you were in … and as we had a number of attendees who battled to connect to the session we have decided to drop the “raw” and “unedited” recordings and associated slides on our Codeplex guidance site to the Session Recordings release.

  1. The Session Recordings contain:
  2. A recording from last year which covers an overview of the VM Factory.
  3. Slides in XPS and PDF format for the How To session.
  4. Recording of the How To session.

Remember that the posted recordings are raw and unedited, shared to promote transparency and sharing of information.

Please send us your questions and comments.