ALM Rangers Visual Studio 11 Readiness – Part 4: A small peek at the upcoming Lab Management Guidance

  • Article

This is part to an exploration of the upcoming ALM Rangers solutions for Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server 11. Previous posts:

In this post we are taking a look at the Lab Management Guidance which also delivered a great ALPHA release:

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Abstract

Provide practical and scenario-based guidance for Visual Studio Lab Management, backed by VM Factory automation.
Codename: African Hawk Eagle (AHE)
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Epics

  • I would like to understand the changes and impact of Dev11 on Lab Management
  • I would like all feedback and suggestions from the community on v1 addressed

A phenomenal new Hands-on Lab

I had the privilege of reviewing a new hands-on lab in which you will learn how Microsoft Visual Studio Lab Management can be used as the infrastructure for a build, deploy and test process. Visual Studio 11 enhance the product by providing so called Standard Lab Environments, which allows you to set up Lab Management labs without minimum additional infrastructure … this is a great new feature and I had an environment up and running, including build, deploy and test processes in less than an hour.

Four screenshots I took during my evaluation journey …

LabManSCreenShotLabManSCreenShot2
LabManSCreenShot3LabManSCreenShot4

A summary of changes to date … the team has not been idling Smile

  • Built an enhanced Lab Template PPP_PRD_045_3D_people-Thumbs_Up
  • Built a parallel CI Template
  • Guidance for the enhanced and parallel CI templates
  • Lab Management build activities (10 new activities!)
  • Created a new Quick Reference Poster for Lab Management 11
  • Created a demo video for the Parallel CI template
  • Hands on lab (in time for TR14) on build-deploy-test with TFS11 standard environments
  • Updated the v1 guide for VS/TFS11
  • Lot of fun and interesting meeting and discussions

Soon to come

  • SharePoint deployment guidance
  • SQL Server deployment guidance

Great stuff Mathias Olausson and team!