VM Prep Tool for Visual Studio Team Lab Management 2010
Visual Studio Team Lab Management 2010 (
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/ee712698.aspx) enables teams to accelerate setup/tear down and restoration of complex virtual environments to a known state for test execution and build automation. As part of configuring Lab Management, one of the required steps to be performed is to create a Lab Ready Virtual Machine or Template in System Center Virtual Machine Manager (
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee518910(VS.100).aspx). The VM Prep Toolkit enables users to automate the steps required to create Lab ready VM templates. This tool accelerates the process taken to configure Lab Management for the first time and enables users to start using Lab Management quickly.
The VM Prep Tool takes a deployed virtual machine as a starting point, installs and configures build, lab and test agents on it and converts it into a VM template that can then be imported into the Lab management library.
Current Release
The VM Prep Tool Update 1.2 is the (
http://vslabmgmt.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=37853) is the latest release of this tool and is compatible with Visual Studio Team Lab Management 2010 Beta2. This release hs been updated with broader OS support for converting
Windows Server 2008 SP2, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows7 to Lab ready VM templates. The following are the key features, known limitations and link to installation steps.
Key features
- Automated installation of Build Agent, lab Agent and Test Agent on a networked domain joined virtual machine
- Automated configuration of build agent and test agent
- Automated provisioning of accounts on virtual machine to enable controller-agent communication
- New Feature in the Update 1.2 release:
- Added support for Windows Servewr 2008 Sp2, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows7 and 64 bit operating system
- Improved reliability and error handling
- Reduced number of input parameters
- Support for skipping templatization step
Known limitations
- Default Firewall settings on Workgroup machines can interfere with the tool. We recommend turning off the firewall on the VM as a work-around.
- The account used to run the tool must be administrator on the host used to deploy the virtual machine.
- The credentials used to connect to the VM needs to be the built-in administrator account for Workgroup VMs
- Template creation could fail during sysprep step due to rearm issue. Refer http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;929828 for rearm issues. This error may occur if the Windows Software Licensing Rearm program has run more than three times in a single Windows Vista+ image. To workaround, ensure that the input VM used for template creation has not be created in this way VM1 -> Template1 -> VM2 -> Template2 -> Input VM.
- If the VMM connection is lost between the VMM Administrative Console and the VMM Server, the script will fail. Re-run the tool when the connection is available.
User Guide
- The user guide including pre-requisites, installation and execution steps is available in the documentation section: