Painless Environment Setups in Lab Mgmt
Today to add a new environment can take weeks to setup, let alone prep for builds. This whole process needs to be simplified.
1. Install of VM Lab components should be done by 1 installer, not 3.
2. VM Test machines should have their own best practice analyzers to check for problems
3. Creating automated builds should be easier by...
3a. Providing common template scripts for the most basic tasks such as deploy web site, backup database, etc.
3b. Need a better way to supply .config file changes per environment at this level.
4. It would be nice to see the version of the build deployed to the environment in MTM.
5. Isolated Network Environments setup should have more guidance and possibly sample VMs.
irperez
shared this idea
Thanks for helping us by making improvement suggestions for Lab Management! Visual Studio 2012 and Team Foundation Server 2012 should address #1 and #2 on your list. I’m interested in hearing more about what you think in #3, #4, and #5. (I’ll reach out to you shortly.)
Let us know what you think after kicking the tires of the 2012 release.
There’s not really a good way for me to split each of these into separate User Voice items but I’ll mark the whole item as started since we haven’t released the Visual Studio 2012 family just yet.
Ed Blankenship, Program Manager, Lab Management – Visual Studio ALM
5 comments
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Allen Mathias
commented
Hi,
Can you share some more details on what issues you are running into with your test controller?
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irperez
commented
I finally got around to playing with VStudio 2012 & TFS 2012. I would say the agent installer is great! Thanks for the improvement there!
The one snag I ran into which may be outside the scope of this feature is I am having trouble upgrading the Test Controller.
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irperez
commented
#5 Well, the actual domain controller itself wasn't, but the networking between the domain controller, the VMHost and the other vm's was confusing. If we had template dc and template vms for this setup, would help a ton.
#3 A blog post would be ok, but may be hard to find for other users. I was able to get around this eventually but it was a huge learning curve. You know, maybe a sample script or 2 in the MSDN documentation showing how its used may be even better. We just had no samples to go by. We need to have samples like "Hey if you are deploying using MSDeploy with Lab Mgmt do this." or "If you are going to deploy databases using database projects, here is a sample using Northwind db, step 1, step 2, step 3 with actual scripts"...
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Ed Blankenship commented
Hi Ivan,
#3 - I hear you there. In the short term for the 2012 release, do you think blog posts of how you might implement those two scenarios in the deployment logic for Lab Management in Visual Studio/TFS 2012 might help people move forward?
#4 - I am creating a specific item on our backlog for this one.
#5 - That's interesting. The domain controller template was the friction point for you in getting network isolation to work? Was there anything else specifically that kept you from adopting network isolation? I'm trying to understand which parts of the process were complex. Thanks a ton!
Ed Blankenship - Microsoft
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irperez
commented
It would be very convenient to have scripts that are ready to go or templates of the most common tasks when doing environmental builds and deploy. To me these would be a script to deploy an msdeploy website or a basic copy script with the basic parameters already in place. Having samples like this helps us to understand how the scripts should work. Another example would be a database compare and deploy for a specified environment. Right now there is nothing to go by and it took me a long time to figure things out.
As for #4, in the test manager, in the lab mgmt tab, we can't tell what version of our app is running. And with 12+ environments it can be easy to lose track.
As for isolated networks. This was so hard to just get up and running that we just quit on it. Having a premade domain controller would be nice as a template.
