Problems I had to address when setting up TFS 2012 Lab Environments with existing Hyper-V VMs

Whilst moving all our older test Hyper-V VMs into a new TFS 2012 Lab Management instance I have had to address a few problems. I already posted about the main one of cross domain communications. This post aims to list the other workaround I have used.

MTM can’t communicate with the VMs

When setting up an environment that includes existing VMs it is vital that the PC running MTM |(Lab Center) can communicate with all the VMs involved. The best indication I have found that you will not have problems is to use a simple Ping. If you are creating a SCVMM environment you need to be able to Ping the fully qualified machine name as it has been picked up by Hyper-V e.g: server1.test.local. If creating a standard environment you only need to be able to Ping the name you specify for the machine e.g: server1 or maybe server.corp.com.

If Ping fails then you can be sure that the MTM create environment verify step will also fail. The most likely reasons both are failing are

• There are DNS issues, the VM names are missing, leases have expired, they are not in the domains expected or are just plain wrong. I found the best solution for me is to edit the local hosts file on the PC running MTM. Just add the name and fully qualified name as well as the correct IP address. You should then be able Ping the VM (unless there is a firewall issue, see below). The host file is only needed on the MTM PC whist the environment is created, once the environment is setup the hosts file is not needed.
• File and print sharing needs to be opened through the firewall on the VM (control panel > firewall > allow applications through firewall)
• Missing/out of date Hyper-V extensions on the VM. This only matters if it is a SCVMM environment being created as this is how the fully qualified is found. This is best spotted in MTM as you get a error on the Machine properties tab. The fix is to reinstall the extensions via the Hyper-V Manager  (Actions > Insert Integration Services Disk, and maybe run the setup on the VM if it does not start)

Can’t see a running VM in the list of available VMs

When composing an environment from running VMs one problem I had was that though a VM was running it did not appear in the list in MTM. This turned out to be due to the fact that the VM had meta data associating it with an different environment (in my case a dating back to our TFS2010 instance).

This is easy to fix, in SCVMM or Hyper-V Manager open the VM settings and make sure the name/ note field (red box below) is empty.

Once the settings are saved you will have to wait a little while before SCVMM picks up the changes and lets you copy of MTM know the VM is available.