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We are currently using TFS Lab Management on a local server in our organisation. With TFS 2013 being deployable in the cloud, are the Lab Management capabilities also available? We need to be able to environments for testing and nightly builds.

andrew_scfc
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Team Foundation Service should begin to work with Lab Management starting with the Visual Studio 2013 release of the Test Controller and Test Agent if you host them in Windows Azure IaaS machines. You'll be able to use those Azure IaaS virtual machines as "standard environments" but not as "SCVMM environments" since they are not in SCVMM. Lab Management currently does not support SCVMM managing Azure-based environments.

This is certainly an interesting area for the product team as we help teams take advantage of the cloud for development & test workloads.

As far as hosted builds, have you looked at the Cloud Build Service that is provided with Team Foundation Service?

Hope that helps!

Ed Blankenship
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  • Thanks for your response. That is a little disappointing for us as without the SCVMM behaviour, there is no great benefit to using to TFS to administer a test lab. I do understand though that technically I can understand how developing this would be extremely challenging! – andrew_scfc Sep 18 '13 at 09:07
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    What we need is the ability to revert to a snapshot before tests take place. That is the key value that TFS adds over other solutions we considered. I am unaware of any other product that offers this behaviour out of the box. Does anyone know of any products that do offer this behaviour when targeting a cloud service such as Azure or AWS? – andrew_scfc Sep 18 '13 at 09:10
  • The benefits are still being able to queue automated test runs from your test plans in MTM, collecting rich data from a manual test run or automated test run to file bugs with, and benefit from automated deployments. Totally understand on wanting to have snapshots to a known clean state or to a specific deployment. Great suggestion to make sure that has captured your votes on User Voice! (visualstudio.uservoice.com) – Ed Blankenship Sep 20 '13 at 03:23
  • There aren't any other products currently that I know of that provide what you are looking for with either Azure or Amazon. Again, it's an interesting area for the product team to explore in future investments. – Ed Blankenship Sep 20 '13 at 03:24
  • Thanks for all your help so far! I'll definitely get it on the user voice forum. Can I just suggest one possible solution? Could you install SCVMM on one azure machine, create a hyper-v host on another azure machine and configure a physical TFS server to target the virtual SCVMM machine in Azure? That would give us the flexibility to increase the power of our testing infrastructure while only having to maintain one physical server on site. We could just add additional azure Hyper-V host machines whenever our requirements increased. – andrew_scfc Sep 20 '13 at 08:29
  • Unfortunately not - you are not able to add another Azure IaaS machine as a Hyper-V host since that IaaS machine is a virtual machine. A virtual machine is not able to be a physical Hyper-V host. – Ed Blankenship Sep 20 '13 at 15:44
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While I haven't tested it myself, you can look at Skytap. They have an extension which allows you to use their cloud environment for build/deploy/test from TFS. Don't know if they work with TFS as a service, but you can ask. The benefit is that you can maintain different topologies as templates (including AD, etc...), start these envs for testing and then destroy the env when done. More info at: https://cloud.skytap.com/docs/index.php/How_to_set_up_and_use_the_Skytap_Automation_Pack_for_Visual_Studio_Team_Foundation_Server

This is definitely something we want to try ourselves, but we haven't had a chance yet.

You can also look at Cloudshare. It appears that are going to provide the same capability.

tonyM
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