Visual Studio Lab Management

Managing the needs of a quality assurance lab can be quite challenging. 

A dizzying number of machines need to be set up, torn down, or restored to a particular snapshot so the software team can work at maximum efficiency.  Daily builds need to be available on schedule.  Multiple virtual machine environments need to be managed.  Managing a lab efficiently can be a significant task.

Today we are announcing the availability of Visual Studio Lab Management for Visual Studio Test Professional 2010 with MSDN and Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN customers. 

Lab Management enables automation and optimization of the build-deploy-test process, while maintaining visibility into the process, using Hyper-V virtualization technologies.  Lab Management stores, manages, and lets you deploy to known configurations and test environments using System Center Virtual Machine Manager.  Test Manager 2010 allows team members to create, start, stop, and view environments so testers and developers can collaborate without interrupting lab operations.

Getting an environment configured correctly just to reproduce a bug can take significant time and effort.  Lab Management allows testers to provide a link to a virtual machine snapshot directly in a bug report so developers can see exactly what testers see.  Developers can spend more time debugging and less time installing, configuring, and deploying.

To find out more about Lab Management, visit the Lab Management site

Update: You can download here a VM and hands-on-lab which allows you to experience lab management capabilities using the new Standard Environment introduced with TFS 2012.

Namaste!