Visual Studio Lab Management

What is Visual Studio Lab Management 2010?

Visual Studio Lab Management 2010 is a new offering in the Visual Studio 2010 release wave. Lab Management 2010 enables teams to configure and manage a virtual lab environment. Lab Management works with System Center Virtual Machine Manager for enabling teams to create environment templates, provision ring-fenced environments, and checkpoint those environments. Using Lab Management, you can accelerate setup, tear down and restoration of complex virtual environments to a known state for test execution and build automation. It extends build automation by automating virtual machine provisioning, build deployment and build verification in an integrated manner. It also enables testers to file rich bugs with links to environment checkpoints that developers can use to recreate complex environments, effectively reducing wasted time and resources in your development and test life cycle. Those checkpoints can be attached to bugs filed using the Microsoft Test Manager enabling the person fixing the bug to open the environment right to the appropriate point in the application flow.

What are the pricing details of Visual Studio Lab Management 2010?

Suggested FPP retail price for Visual Studio Lab Management 2010 is US$1,599. Of course, the majority of customers are likely to qualify for a lower price point based on volume licensing discounts. Feel free to share this data with your customers to help them budget for Lab Management. Lab Management 2010 will be priced as per physical processor (each processor of each lab server must be licensed for Visual Studio Lab Management 2010). Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate or Visual Studio Test Professional 2010 is required to manage lab environments.

A dizzying number of machines need to be set up, torn down, or restored to a particular snapshot so the software team can work at maximum efficiency. Daily builds need to be available on schedule. Multiple virtual machine environments need to be managed. Managing a lab efficiently can be a significant task.

Lab Management enables automation and optimization of the build-deploy-test process, while maintaining visibility into the process, using Hyper-V virtualization technologies. Lab Management stores, manages, and lets you deploy to known configurations and test environments using System Center Virtual Machine Manager. Test Manager 2010 allows team members to create, start, stop, and view environments so testers and developers can collaborate without interrupting lab operations.

Getting an environment configured correctly just to reproduce a bug can take significant time and effort. Lab Management allows testers to provide a link to a virtual machine snapshot directly in a bug report so developers can see exactly what testers see. Developers can spend more time debugging and less time installing, configuring, and deploying.