Is possible to use the same physical environment in more than one project?

Question

Hello,

We have a physical lab environment currently working nightly automated test for one project, say project A. We would like to run nightly automated tests for a second project in the same environment, but we don't find a way to share the environment of project A. Someone knows a way to do this?

We have set up two different environments (one for each project), both with the same agent machine, but the environment is in 'Ready' status for project A and in 'Not Ready' status in the other project. Repairing the 'broken' environment makes the working one to enter 'Not Ready' status.

Found http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vslab/thread/55a2982c-85b9-45b0-85c6-e03fd9c087d0/ which is exactly the same that we want to do. So in late 2010 this option of sharing physical environments was not possible... Is there any update to this?

Thanks!!

Answer 1

Neoplane,

I'm not aware of any way to do this. Information about the environment gets logged in multiple locations (TFS Database, in the description of each machine in the environment in SCVMM/Hyper-V in the case of Hyper-V VMs, etc.). I have a feeling that this is why you are seeing the "Not Ready" status in one team project and the "Ready" status in the other team project. When you "repair" the environment, you are updating this information to use the new team project.

Jarrett

Answer 2

Thanks for the answer Jarrett,

Tried many ways, even manually changing the TFS database, but we don't think this is a affordable way of sharing the environment. We finally will merge our different projects or look for a way to create a single project with all our tests.

Anyway, it could a be a nice improvement to MTM if Microsoft creates the possibility of sharing a physical environment.