Visual Studio Team Lab Management is a new member of the Visual Studio Team 2010 family of products. Lab Management helps you save time and resources during application development and testing by introducing virtualization into the following tasks:

• Create environments quickly. Instead of spending several days to create an environment, you can create an environment in minutes. Development teams frequently require multiple environments to be set up for different purposes and with different configurations. Using Lab Management, team members can compose complex, multi-machine environments quickly from a set of "golden" virtual machines. After they have been created, these environments can be stored and reused. This saves time from repeated setups. In addition to saving work, this approach helps in creating environments that are consistent with one another and with production systems.

• Automate the deployment of daily builds on environments. Teams can author workflows to automate the deployment of their daily application builds onto clean snapshots of virtual environments. Using virtual machine snapshots allows you to start from the same known state of the environment for every build. After the application is deployed, you can run tests through the same automated workflow to verify the integrity of the build.

• File bugs that can be reproduced easily. Testers can attach snapshots of environment to the bugs they file. Developers can easily reproduce the problems by connecting to the same environments in the same state where the bugs were found. Therefore, developers do not have to spend time reproducing either the environment or the bug.

• Speed up testing through cloning and snapshots. Frequently, testers and developers have to coordinate the use of a shared environment. By using virtualization and Lab Management, testers and developers can create clones of the same environment and work in parallel. Using snapshots also speeds up testing because a tester can revert to a clean snapshot before running each test case without having to worry about the result of the previous test.

• Use physical resources more efficiently. Pooling underused physical machines and using them through Lab Management improves their utilization. These pools can also be partitioned and allocated to team projects to match their relative priorities.

Lab Management works together with two other Microsoft products:

• Hyper-V, a hypervisor that is part of Windows Server 2008. For more information about Hyper-V, see Overview of Hyper-V.

• System Center Virtual Machine Manager, a tool for managing virtual machines spread across hypervisors. For more information about Virtual Machine Manager, see Overview of Virtual Machine Manager.

Lab Management is a part of Team Foundation Server, and is known as Lab Management within the Team Foundation Administration Console and Microsoft Test and Lab Manager. In addition, Lab Management integrates with Visual Studio Team Foundation Build and Visual Studio Premium to provide out-of-the-box capabilities for application deployment and testing on virtual environments.

Use the following tasks to help you incorporate virtualization into your development, deployment, and testing.