Not every project can host services in the cloud. If you have a local environment running on virtual machines, connecting to that from the Android emulator running on the same host can be tricky. This post details the solution I use and the tools needed to enable it.
Using Lability, DSC and ARM to define and deploy multi-VM environments # Configuration as code crops up a lot in conversation these days. We are searching for that DevOps Nirvana of a single definition of our environment that we can deploy anywhere.
The new NAT virtual switch that can be created on Windows 10 for Hyper-V virtual machines is a wonderful thing if you’re an on-the-go evangelist like myself. For more information on how to create one, see Thomas Maurer’s post on the subject.
DDD North 2013 was a fantastic community conference but sadly I didn’t get chance to deliver my grok talk on Generation 2 virtual machines. A few people came up to me beforehand to say they were interested in the topic, and a few more spoke to me afterwards to ask if I would blog. I had planned to write a post anyway, but when you know it’s something people want to read you get a bit more of a push.
As you will have read on both mine and Richard’s blogs, we have recently upgraded our Lab environment and it wasn’t the smoothest of processes.
However, as always it has been a learning experience and this post is all about building VM environments that can be sucked into Lab and turned into a Lab environment that can be pushed out multiple times.
As you’ve probably seen, our Lab Manager/SCVMM 2008 R2 upgrade to SCVMM 2012 SP1 was not the smoothest in the world. The end result was a clean lab manager and SCVMM install, but a raft of virtual machines that had previously been part of environments.
Richard has posted a group effort article on his blog about our System Center 2008 R2/Lab Manager upgrade to System Center 2012 SP1/Lab Manager. All did not go swimmingly…
I have more helpful notes that I am writing up myself and will post over the next few days around the steps to fix virtual machines that are part of an environment and tips on building complex multi-machine rigs for lab manager.
More and more of our projects include a stipulation from the client that any web sites must work on the tablet devices of senior management. Up until recently that was exclusively iPads, but we are now seeing more Android devices out there. I wanted to find a straightforward way for us to test on such devices, preferably without needing to build up a collection of expensive physical kit.
WP_000140 Yesterday was great fun and I was really pleased to see so many Black Marble event regulars at the IT Camp. It was great to hear so many requests for more events like it in Leeds. We’re all keen to run more, but we need people to attend and give us feedback in order to be able to do that.
A sensible plan # This is a torrid tale of frustration and annoyance, tempered by the fun of digging through system commands and registry entries to try and get things working.
True to form, you only discover something isn’t working when you’re in a desperate hurry. We use lots of Hyper-V VMs here at Black Marble and they are mostly running on our four node cluster. I use Failover Cluster Manager and this morning I couldn’t connect remotely to any of the Hyper-V VMs. I kept getting an error:
I’m using the Mini9 quite a lot lately, at least in part to fiddle with Windows 7. I decided it would be nice to be able to access our Hyper-V servers so I went looking for the management tools…
As part of a customer project I needed to create a Netware environment for testing. It’s been a little while since I did any netware management and I quite enjoyed it. I did, however, encounter a couple of gotchas which I thought I’d write up for the greater good.
