What is the Visual Studio 2010 Lab Management feature?

Hello, November! If you have already downloaded and started using Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2, you are probably enjoying the new and improved features. In the Team System (or should we say, Team Foundation Server from now on) there is a completely new feature called Lab Management, which I haven't seen implemented in other Windows development tools before.

The idea of Lab Management is to help developers and testers test their applications automatically in virtual machines. Lab Management uses virtual machine provisioning with the help of System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM), and can launch and tear down virtual machines automatically and run your tests in them as you prefer.

This can bring tremendeous time savings in testing, as you don't anymore need to manually set up testing machines, either physical or virtual. Instead, you can use Lab Management to automatically run tests on say, Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7. Or, on multiple IIS web server versions, if that's what you need.

Sounds like a novel implementation to me, though the idea of virtual machine automation is not completely new, as demonstrated by my article from November, 2008.