VM Prep Tool for Visual Studio Lab Management

Before you can start creating virtual test environments in Visual Studio Lab management you need virtual machines (VMs) or templates to create these virtual environments. To enable testing, build-deploy-test workflow and network isolation capabilities on these environments, you need to install Visual Studio Test Agent, Visual Studio Lab Agent and Team Foundation Build Agent on VMs and templates that are part of the lab environments.
Microsoft released a tool that automates this process of upgrading/installing Test, Build, and Lab Agents on a Virtual machine and configuring them. It also provides support for automating the process of creating templates with agents installed on them.

Before you can start using it, you’ll have to execute some steps:

Download RTM version of VS Agents Installer ISO and TFS installer ISO from Microsoft download center:

VS Agents Installer: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=a3216d2a-0530-4f6c-a7c9-0df37c54a902&displaylang=en
TFS Installer (needed for build agent): http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/5/1/15139F21-8A10-44E8-99D5-B37316D3F00F/X16-42785VS2010TFS1.iso
Download patches for all lab management software: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=8406ef19-35a3-4c03-a145-08ba982f3cef&displaylang=en

Extract the ISOs and store the extracted files on a well-known file share that is accessible from VMs that are part of your Lab Environment. (You can use third party tools like WIN-RAR (www.rarlab.com) to extract the ISO. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_ISO_image_software for other options)
Assuming your file-share is \\Share, you can create the layout as follows

Download the VMPrepTool.msi and LabMgmt.ISO as mentioned before http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/vslabmgmt
Run VMPrepTool.msi which will install VMPrepTool_RTM.zip to the specified destination folder.

Right click on the zip file -> Properties. On bottom of the General Tab click “Unblock”. Click Apply and Ok (This will enable executing the contained PowerShell script on your machine)

Unzip the VMpreptool_RTM.zip and place the contents on the same share. Copy Labmgmt.ISO on to your share as well.

Afterwards you can log in on the Virtual Machine you want to configure, browse to the file share and start the VMPreptoolUI.exe.

Azure DevOps/ GitHub emoji

I’m really bad at remembering emoji’s. So here is cheat sheet with all emoji’s that can be used in tools that support the github emoji markdown markup: All credits go to rcaviers who created this list.

Kubernetes–Limit your environmental impact

Reducing the carbon footprint and CO2 emission of our (cloud) workloads, is a responsibility of all of us. If you are running a Kubernetes cluster, have a look at Kube-Green . kube-green is a simple Kubernetes operator that automatically shuts down (some of) your pods when you don't need them. A single pod produces about 11 Kg CO2eq per year( here the calculation). Reason enough to give it a try! Installing kube-green in your cluster The easiest way to install the operator in your cluster is through kubectl. We first need to install a cert-manager: kubectl apply -f https://github.com/cert-manager/cert-manager/releases/download/v1.14.5/cert-manager.yaml Remark: Wait a minute before you continue as it can take some time before the cert-manager is up & running inside your cluster. Now we can install the kube-green operator: kubectl apply -f https://github.com/kube-green/kube-green/releases/latest/download/kube-green.yaml Now in the namespace where we want t...

Podman– Command execution failed with exit code 125

After updating WSL on one of the developer machines, Podman failed to work. When we took a look through Podman Desktop, we noticed that Podman had stopped running and returned the following error message: Error: Command execution failed with exit code 125 Here are the steps we tried to fix the issue: We started by running podman info to get some extra details on what could be wrong: >podman info OS: windows/amd64 provider: wsl version: 5.3.1 Cannot connect to Podman. Please verify your connection to the Linux system using `podman system connection list`, or try `podman machine init` and `podman machine start` to manage a new Linux VM Error: unable to connect to Podman socket: failed to connect: dial tcp 127.0.0.1:2655: connectex: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it. That makes sense as the podman VM was not running. Let’s check the VM: >podman machine list NAME ...

The art of simplicity

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