Get ready for Lab Management

I was going to write about it for a while, but got swamped with relocation and such. But luckily, somebody else written a post summing it up nicely, so I can just put up the link :)

So here – the technology I wanted to write about is something absolutely new that is coming with Visual Studio Team System 2010. Lab Management is going to change the way you do the testing in the enterprise, and it is one technology you might want to follow closely.

Think about all the time and effort you could save if you could manage groups of Virtual Machines at once, create new VMs on the fly, and establish association between bug and problem VM image (and since the image will be exactly in the same state as at the time of the bug occurrence, you will get yourself a repro right at your fingertips).

There are alternative products on the market (such as VMWare Lab Manager), however the potential strength of MS offering is in the integration between Lab Manager, Hyper-V and Team Foundation Server (and the product will also provide integration with VMWare ESX offering in addition to Hyper-V).

To read more about why Lab Manager idea is an awesome one and what’s coming, read this post at Microsoft Visualization Team blog.