How to: Change the Host Groups for Your Team Project Collections

You can use the host groups in System Center Virtual Machine Manager as a convenient way to monitor and manage virtual machine hosts. Hosts are the computers in the host group that you use to deploy virtual environments in Visual Studio Lab Management. You create and manage host groups by using SCVMM. In Lab Management, you can specify which host groups to use for a team project collection.

If you want to add a host to an existing host group, you must use SCVMM to accomplish this task. For more information, see this Microsoft Web site. If you do add a host, you must also verify the following:

• The Team Foundation Server service account has been added to the Administrators group on this new host.

• The network location on the host is the same as the other hosts so that the virtual machines can communicate with each other.

• The host has been added to the correct host group.

After you have configured Lab Management for the first time, you might later want to change the host groups that are used by your team project collection. For example, you need more hosts because the volume of use has increased. You can choose to add another host group that you can use to your existing team project collection to increase your capacity. You can add multiple host groups to any team project collection.

You can change the host groups for a team project collection using the Administration Console for Team Foundation. Or, you can use the command-line to accomplish the same task. For more information about the command-line utility TFSLabConfig, see Configuring Lab Management with TFSLabConfig.

Use the following procedure to change the host groups for your team project collection by using the Administration Console for Team Foundation. For each host in a host group that you add, you must also run the steps in the procedure to improve the reliability of WinRM. To expand your virtual lab, see Expanding or Changing Your Virtual Lab.

To add or remove host groups for your team project collection

1. In the Team Foundation Administration Console, under Application Tier, click Team Project Collections.

2. In the right-side pane, click the appropriate team project collection from the list of project collections.

3. Click the Lab Management tab, and then click Configure Host Groups.

   The Edit Project Collection Level Lab Management Settings dialog box is displayed.

4. To add a host group, on the Host Groups tab, click Add and Verify.

   1. In the Select Host Groups dialog box, click one or more SCVMM host groups that this team project collection will use, and then click Add.

   2. To add the host group to each team project in the team project collection, select Auto Provision for the host group.

      Note

      If you select to auto provision the host group, Team Foundation Server automatically adds the host group to all the team projects in this team project collection. For team projects that have not yet been created, the host group is added when the New Team Project wizard creates the project. For team projects that have already been created in this team project collection, the host group is added when these settings are saved. If you clear Auto Provision the host group will no longer be added to new team projects that you add to your team project collection.

5. To delete a host group from your team project collection, on the Host Groups tab, select the host group from the list, and click Delete.

   Important

   Before you can delete a host group from a team project collection, you must first remove all Lab Management environments that are in this host group using Microsoft Test Manager. Then you must remove the association of this host group from each team project in that project collection using the command line utility TFSLabConfig. For more information about how to do this, see TFSLabConfig DeleteTeamProjectHostGroup Command.

6. Click Verify to confirm these host groups are correctly configured for Lab Management.

   1. If the Team Foundation Server service account (tfssvc) has not been added as an administrator on one or more of hosts in these host groups, a dialog box prompts you for your username and password.

   2. Type the user name and password that has administrator permissions on all the physical hosts in the host groups you want to add to this collection. These credentials will be used to add the Team Foundation Server service account into the Administrator Group of hosts in the selected host groups. Click OK

   3. Click See logs for more information, fix all the errors, and then click Verify again.

7. Click OK.

Improve the Reliability of WinRM

You must make following changes to the default configuration settings for Windows Remote Management for each host in a host group that you have added. The changes to these settings help improve the reliability of WinRM because Lab Management performs a larger number of operations on Hyper-V hosts than are performed in a typical production scenario for Hyper-V.

To change Windows Remote Management configuration settings

1. Click Start, right-click Command Prompt, and then click Run as administrator.

   Note

   You must be a domain user that has been added to the administrators group for this machine.

2. At the command prompt, run the following command:

   winrm set winrm/config @{MaxTimeoutms = "1800000"}

3. If the host operating system is Windows Server 2008 SP2, also run the following command:

   winrm set winrm/config/Service @{MaxConcurrentOperations="200"} -r:http://<HyperVHost>

   (Replace HyperVHost with the computer name of the Hyper-V host.)

   Note

   To create a WinRM listener on http://<HyperVHost>, you might also have to run the following command:

   winrm quickconfig

4. Restart winrm and the SCVMM agent on the hosts after you make these changes using the following commands:

   net stop winrm

   net start winrm

   net start vmmagent

See Also

Tasks

Create a Team Project Collection

Concepts

Configuring Your Server Using the Team Foundation Administration Console

Other Resources

Changing Existing Lab Management Configurations