Visual Studio Lab Management is a software development tool developed by

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation, multinational technology company, technology corporation producing Software, computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at th ...

for software testers to create and manage virtual environments. Lab Management extends the existing

Visual Studio Application Lifecycle Management Visual Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) from Microsoft. It is used to develop computer programs including websites, web apps, web services and mobile apps. Visual Studio uses Microsoft software development platforms such ...

platform to enable an integrated

Hyper-V Microsoft Hyper-V, codenamed Viridian, and briefly known before its release as Windows Server Virtualization, is a native hypervisor; it can create virtual machines on x86-64 systems running Windows. Starting with Windows 8, Hyper-V superseded Wi ...

based test lab. Since Visual Studio 2012, it is already shipped as a part of it; and, can be set up after Azure DevOps and SCVMM are integrated.

Virtual Environment

A virtual environment is a collection of virtual machines (VMs). Each

Virtual Machine In computing, a virtual machine (VM) is the virtualization/ emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve specialized har ...

in a virtual environment represents a role required for the application that is to be tested, developed or run. Lab Management can be used to start all the virtual machines in a virtual environment to run an application, or test an application. Lab Management uses

System Center Virtual Machine Manager System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) forms part of Microsoft's System Center line of virtual machine management and reporting tools, alongside previously established tools such as System Center Operations Manager and System Center Confi ...

(SCVMM) to allow access to virtual machines or templates in a library as golden masters. These golden masters are created by using either Hyper-V or SCVMM. SCVMM is used to deploy the virtual machines and templates in the environments on the specified host group.

Using Lab Management for application lifecycle management

Visual Studio Lab Management is integrated with

(SCVMM) to enable management of multiple physical computers that host virtual machines and to manage the storage of virtual machines, virtual machine templates, and other configuration files in SCVMM library servers. It enables users to: * Reproduce the exact conditions of a bug or other development issue * Build, deploy, and test applications automatically in a clean environment * Reduce the time required to create and configure machines for testing an application * Run multiple copies of a test or development at the same time * Create and manage virtual environments without requiring system administrator privileges

References

External links

Visual Studio 2010 Lab management

Configuring and administering lab management
{{MS DevTools 2005 software 2008 software 2010 software Bug and issue tracking software Build automation Microsoft server technology Lab Management Proprietary version control systems Unit testing frameworks