The Team Foundation Server logs of a client was filling up with errors about a failing job: LabManager VMM Server Background Synchronization. This runs every few minutes and tries to keep the LabManager server up to date.
The reason why this job fails on our system is because the Lab Management functionality is no longer in use. We used it when we were still on Team Foundation Server 2012. But when we moved to Team Foundation Server 2013, we didn’t upgrade the Lab Management part as well. So the Lab Management parts were gone and we didn’t de-register it first.
I wanted to get rid of these errors and decided to look for a solution.
First thing I tried was using the tfsconfig command and ask TFS to delete the lab management part:
tfsconfig lab /delete /collectionName:<collectionname>
But this failed with a TF255384 error complaining that the Virtual Machine Manager Administration Console could not be found on the application server. I didn’t want to install it again, so I looked for another solution. This blog post mentioned that I could delete the lab management data from the Configuration database. It sounds like a hack, it smells like a hack and it even looks like a hack. But I had a backup of all components, so why not?
I connected the TFS Database Server and executed the SQL script as mentioned in the post:
use Tfs_Configuration;
delete
tbl_RegistryItems
where
ParentPath = '#\Configuration\Application\LabManagementSettings\';
And the great thing is, it worked!