I am very excited that at midnight we shipped the latest Rangers solution the VM Factory!
What is the Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010 VM Factory?
The purpose of this project is to build prescriptive guidance around the virtualization of the Visual Studio 2010 and guidance for full automation of the creation of virtual machines. The goal is to help users with the installation and configuration of virtualized environments with least effort and maximum automation.
You can download it from Codeplex
What is in the package?
The download package consists of two ZIP package downloads:- 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.
The two little secrets of this is that the guidance, while targeting specific products on VM’s can actually be used as a base for non-VM scenarios and as since products like TFS use a lot of core services, for example SQL, there is a lot that can be used to build on for working with other products. The other secret is that a lot of the PowerShell scripts here are my own work, so I am very excited to see them get used and get some feedback on them!