Rangers – Lab Management Guide: Rough(necks) Notes #4 … Using the Walkthrough VHD

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Part 4, continued from Rangers – Lab Management Guide: Rough(necks) Notes #1, Rangers – Lab Management Guide: Rough(necks) Notes #2 and Rangers – Lab Management Guide: Rough(necks) Notes #3 … Setting up an environment for a mobile Lab Rat.

Today the focus was to connect the Lab Management (pre-release) 2010 Walkthrough VHD image and validate the environment. This is actually quite a boring post to write, because the configuration was eventless :)

Tying up the knots

Stepping through the Lab Management configuration steps was easy, just make sure you read each instruction carefully :) When you see OK status and green ticks, you can smile and go for a cup of coffee.

 

No idea what happened with image in terms of content duplication … I am tired and it looks cool anyhow and therefore left “as is”.

Some mental notes I made:

  1. It took me a while to visualize the relationship of the host (labrat) and the Lab Management Walkthrough server (labserver). In essence these two machine are linked and dependent on each other once you have completed the setup.
  2. The laptop (Rangers – Lab Management Guide: Rough(necks) Notes #3 … Setting up an environment for a mobile Lab Rat) is idling … I am still getting used to all this power in a tiny shell.
  3. The LabServer seems to be idling, but it is apparent that 4GB is the bottom limit in terms of RAM for decent performance.
  4. Green tick … is a good sign. The tight integration of Lab Management into the Team Foundation Server Admin Console is good news amongst the complexity.
  5. OK … is a good sign.

Learning's

  • You need dedicated time to setup the Lab Management and the Lab Management (pre-release) 2010 Walkthrough VHD environment. Time slicing, as I did, is time consuming, counterproductive and frustrating. Set aside a day, disconnect, hide and focus on the task at hand.
  • Hibernating a machine with 8GB RAM takes longer than one with 4 or 3 GB. There is no problem … just more state to manage.
  • The setup of Lab Management is not overly complex, just tedious and we hope that the VMFactory feature team will come up with a smart and user friendly way to setup and configure this walkthrough image.

Next …

In the next post I will give my view on the scenarios included with the Lab Management (pre-release) 2010 Walkthrough VHD image. I just have to find time to hide for ~4 hours.