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Thanks for attending my webinar on lab management
Tue, Apr 23 2013 5:58
Thanks to everyone who attended my webinar session today in TFS Lab Management, I hope the audio issues were not too much of a problem and you found the session useful. We are looking into the causes of the audio problem so hopefully the next webinar will not need people dialling in via the phone unless they want to. A number of people asked for the slides, you... Read More...
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Lab Management webinar next week
Thu, Apr 18 2013 10:53
If you are interested finding out more about TFS Lab Management why not come to the Black Marble Bite size webinar next Tuesday (23rd April). I will be giving a basic overview of the product and discussing some of our experiences implementing it. Read More...
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Lab Management with SCVMM 2012 and /labenvironmentplacementpolicy:aggressive
Tue, Mar 26 2013 6:05
I did a post a year or so ago about setting up TFS Labs and mentioned command C:\Program Files\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010\Tools>tfsconfig lab /hostgroup /collectionName:myTpc  ​/labenvironmentplacementpolicy:aggressive /edit /Name:"My hosts group" This can be used tell TFS Lab Management to place VMs using any memory that is assigned... Read More...
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Installing a DB from a DACPAC using Powershell as part of TFS Lab Management deployment
Thu, Mar 14 2013 11:45
I have been battling setting up a DB deployed via the SQL 2012 DAC tools and Powershell.  My environment was a network isolated pair of machines DC – the domain controller and SQL 2012 server IIS – A web front end As this is network isolated I could only run scripts on the IIS server, so my DB deploy needed to be remote. So the script I ended up with was... Read More...
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Recovering network isolated lab management environments if you have to recreate your SC-VMM server’s DB
Fri, Mar 8 2013 11:12
Whilst upgrading our Lab Management system we lost the SC-VMM DB. This has meant we needed to recreate environments we already have running on Hyper_V hosts but were unknown to TFS. If they were not network isolated this is straight forward, just recompose the environment (after clear out the XML in the VM descriptions fields). However if they are network isolated... Read More...
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Fixing Lab Manager environments with brute force
Tue, Mar 5 2013 11:22
Another post from Rik Fixing Lab Manager environments with brute force following our Lab Management upgrade Read More...
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Creating VMs for lab management
Tue, Mar 5 2013 6:46
Rik has done a post on creating VMs for Lab management to follow up on the one I did yesterday on our Lab upgrade . Read More...
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Upgrading our TFS 2012 Lab Management to use SC-VMM 2012 SP1
Mon, Mar 4 2013 11:45
Background We have been successfully using our TFS Lab Management system for a while. However, we have noticed an issue that when deploying environments the performance of the system slowed. This was down to I/O congestion between our servers and the SAN that provided their main VM storage because the library store and the hyper-v host servers all shared the... Read More...
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Fix for ‘Cannot install test agent on these machines because another environment is being created using the same machines’
Tue, Feb 26 2013 16:04
We have recently been upgrading our TFS 2012QU1 Lab Management system from SCVMM 2008 to SCVMM 2012 SP1. This has not been the nicest experience, we are preparing at least one joint blog post from Rik , Rob and myself on the joys, yes it did take everyone, a lovely cross skill problem. We are now in the process of sorting out the state of running environments... Read More...
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TFS Lab Management and Windows 8 and Server 2012
Mon, Feb 25 2013 13:22
TFS Lab Management can be a good way to manage your development and test environments, providing a means to more easily store, deploy and snapshot environments. Problem is they are not magic, you need to create the virtual machines you will use. You can use tools such the ALM Rangers VM Factory to speed this process, but you still need the source ISOs to create... Read More...
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Why can’t I create an environment using a running VM on my Lab Management system?
Tue, Dec 4 2012 15:47
With TFS lab management you can build environments from stored VM and VM templates stored in an SCVMM library or from VMs running on a Hyper-V host within your lab infrastructure. This second form is what used to be called composing an environment in TFS 2010. Recently when I tried to compose an environment I had a problem. After selecting the running VM inside... Read More...
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Did I delete the right lab?
Thu, Nov 22 2012 10:18
It was bound to happen in the end, the wrong environment got deleted on our TFS Lab Management instance. The usual selection of rushing, minor mistakes, misunderstandings and not reading the final dialog properly and BANG you get that sinking feeling as you see the wrong set of VMs being deleted. Well this happened yesterday, so was there anything that can be... Read More...
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Cannot run coded ui test on a TFS lab due to lack of rights to the drops folder
Fri, Nov 9 2012 14:09
Whilst setting up a TFS 2012 Lab management environment for Coded UI testing we got the problem that none of the tests were running, in fact we could see no tests were even being passed to the agent in the lab On the build report I clicked on  the ‘View Test Results’ which loaded the result in Microsoft Test Manager (MTM) and viewed the test run log, and... Read More...
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More fun with creating TFS 2012 SC-VMM environments
Fri, Oct 5 2012 11:14
Whilst setting up new a new SC-VMM based lab environment I managed to find some new ways to fail above and beyond the ones I have found before . We needed to build a new environment for testing CRM application, this needed to have its own DC, IIS server and a CRM server. The aim was to have this as a network isolated environment, but you have to build it first... Read More...
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TFS Test Agent cannot connect to Test Controller – Part 2
Mon, Oct 1 2012 16:33
I posted last week on the problems I had had getting the test agents and controller in a TFS2012 Standard environment talking to each other and a workaround. Well after a good few email with various people at Microsoft and other consultants at Black Marble I have a whole range of workarounds solutions. First a reminder of my architecture, and note that this could... Read More...
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TFS Test Agent cannot connect to Test Controller gives ‘No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it 127.0.0.1:6910’
Sat, Sep 29 2012 8:38
Whilst setting up a  TFS 2012 Standard Lab Environment for an upcoming demo I hit a problem. Initially my environment had worked fine, I could deploy to my server VM in the environment without error. However, after a reboot of the TFS server (which has the build and test controllers on it) and the single server VM in the environment, the test agent on the... Read More...
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Problems I had to address when setting up TFS 2012 Lab Environments with existing Hyper-V VMs
Mon, Jul 23 2012 17:23
Whilst moving all our older test Hyper-V VMs into a new TFS 2012 Lab Management instance I have had to address a few problems. I already posted about the main one of cross domain communications . This post aims to list the other workaround I have used. MTM can’t communicate with the VMs When setting up an environment that includes existing VMs it is vital that... Read More...
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Getting TFS 2012 Agents to communicate cross domain
Fri, Jul 20 2012 10:27
I don’t know about your systems but historically we have VMs running in test domains that are connected to our corporate LAN. Thus allowing our staff and external testers to access them from their development PC or through our firewall after providing suitable test domain credentials. These test setups are great candidates for system to use the new TFS Lab Management... Read More...
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Have you tried switching it on and off again? Go on be aggressive!
Tue, Jan 31 2012 6:43
We have been building ‘standard’ environments for our TFS Lab Management system. Environments that can be used for most of the projects we are involved in without too much extra setup e.g. a small domain controller VM and a Server VM with SQL and SharePoint. These environments have a series of snapshots so it can be used in a number of ways e.g if we just want... Read More...
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TF266026 error when a workflow will not start in a lab environment
Wed, Jan 18 2012 11:05
A common cause of the TF266026 error is because when the build agent tries to start (it is the build agent that runs the workflows in Lab Management) it cannot access the custom assemblies folder as defined for its parent build controller. Obviously this problem only occurs if you have  set a custom assemblies path for parent build controller. The reason... Read More...
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