Microsoft gets into the virtual lab automation business

The Redmond giant is pushing forward to release its own virtualization solution called Visual Studio 2010 Lab Management

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The virtual lab automation space has been around for many years now.  Companies like Skytap, Surgient, and VMLogix have all made it their business to manage and control these types of environments.  Virtualization platform giant VMware got into the business as well when it acquired Akimbi, a small lab management startup company, back in June 2006.

[ VMLogix and Citrix have signed a new strategic OEM agreement | Surgient talks about the private cloud as the industry continues to push toward standards ]

Like VMware, Microsoft also now finds itself getting into the lab automation business in hopes of further extending their own virtualization platform and management stack.  Originally announced in November of last year, Microsoft is integrating Visual Studio 2010, System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008, and Hyper-V to create its own virtual lab automation solution called, you guessed it, Visual Studio 2010 Lab Management.

 

 

The product is currently in beta, but the Microsoft team is already blogging about the technology.  It starts off the new blog site by describing the product like so:

On the server side, Lab Management service is one of the many services running inside Team Foundation Server (TFS).  This is what makes the Lab Management solution unique for software testers and developers. Now you can map your lab resources, such as, hosts, virtual machines and storage to Team Project Collections and Team Projects; thus aligning lab hardware needs with the business needs for the projects you are working on.

The lab management service in TFS uses System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) for management of lab infrastructure and provisioning of virtual machines across multiple virtualization platforms. You get a copy of SCVMM with Lab Management.

Microsoft Test and Lab Manager is a Windows Presentation Foundation based rich client.  The Lab Center in Test and Lab Manager allows you to: