As most virtualization.info readers know by now, Microsoft is finally approaching the .NET developers with a virtualization-friendly edition of its upcoming IDE Visual Studio 2010.
The product will be called Visual Studio Team System 2010 Lab Management, and will integrate Hyper-V R2 and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2 to offer a virtual lab automation platform that competes against products like VMware Lab Manager, VMLogix LabManager, Surgient Virtual Automation Platform and others.
Microsoft took forever to leverage its huge MSDN community to let Hyper-V slip into new customers’ sites.
Ironically, the company is doing it right now that VMware, who rules the developers world thanks to Workstation, seems to have lost interest in it.
On top of the new Visual Studio 2010, which may be released in Q2 2010, Microsoft recently released another tool called VM Factory:
Visual Studio 2010 VM Factory is the reference implementation of a software solution that automates the creation of Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010 virtualized environments. The purpose of this project is to build prescriptive guidance around virtualization of the Visual Studio 2010 and guidance for full automation of the creation of virtual machines using the VM Factory. The goal is to help users with the installation and configuration of virtualized environments with least effort and maximum automation.
The blueprint, which is released under the Creative Commons 3.0 license, includes the following pieces:
- Rangers Virtualization Guidance
- Focused guidance on creating a Rangers base image manually and introduction of PowerShell scripts to automate many of the configuration tasks.
- Virtualization guidance looking at the “why” and “how” to use virtualization for Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio, including planning, pre-requisite software, use of non-Microsoft virtualization technologies and introducing use case scenarios.
- Rangers Factory Package and Guidance
- Reference walk-through documentation on how to install, configure and support a Microsoft internal or an external factory to automate the installation of Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio environments.
- Microsoft Deployment Toolkit metadata and PowerShell scripts used to create a Rangers factory.