Is Lab Management supported in the cloud in TFS 2013?

Question

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.

Answer 1

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!

Answer 2

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.