Visual Studio Lab Management and Auto Provisioning

Despite it is very handy, the Auto Provisioning feature of Lab Management can become a trouble pretty quickly. If enabled, every Team Project will be authorised to deploy VMs in the VSTLM hosts, a situation which – 99% of the times – becomes unmanageable.

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It’s not a TFS problem, and it depends on how the users are used to work. But if your deployment is used (as it should be, to be fair) and considered ‘as a service’, then IMHO you need to limit the scope a little bit, otherwise your Hyper-V servers are going be clogged like Beijing at the rush hour…or the M25.

There is a pretty quick fix for this though – after you grant the permissions to the specific Team Project to use Lab Management, you need to use two TFSLabConfig (and not TFSConfig Lab) commands: tfslabconfig TPHostGroup and tfslabconfig TPLibraryShare.

After that, you are ready to go!