The Lab Management that was presented with the Microsoft Test and Lab Management (MTLM) is an amazing ability.

With the lab management you can create virtual environments made of one computer or more in minutes.

The ability of managing virtual environments as a lot of advantages when it comes to development and testing, you can now have your private Test Environment or Dev environment, you can save a state of each of the computers when ever you like to, you save space and hardware of physical computers etc.

In this post I like to show how you can create a new virtual environment out of two existing virtual machines that are already deployed on the Host (Saves Time):

Step 1: Launch the MTLM

Step 2: Choose Lab Center in the main dropdown menu

Step 3: Open the “New” Dropdown menu

You will now have 3 options:

1. New physical environment
2. New virtual environment
3. Compose virtual environment (Was added in the Release Candidate)

Step 4: Choose “Compose virtual environment” in order to create environment out of already deployed virtual machines (On the host Hyper-V)

Step 5: Type a Name and make sure that “All Hosts” is selected (Default host group)

Step 6: In the Machines tab choose the virtual machines and add them to the Environment.

Step 7: For each of the virtual machines choose the role of the virtual environment.

At this stage you have an almost ready to use Environment.

Step 8: Choose Machine Properties Tab

Here you can’t change anything because as I already said the virtual machines are already deployed on the host.

Step 9: Choose the Capabilities tab

Step 10: Choose both checkboxes

Note: In the deployed virtual computers I have installed Build agent and Test agent so I will be able to run tests and builds workflow on these machines.

Step 11: Go to the Summary tab and Click Finish

You can see that the environment is running and that the Lab Management is trying to connect to the installed agents on the virtual machines.

All now is ready for use…

On my future posts I will also show how to set environments from templates and more of the Lab Management capabilities.

Have Fun!!!