In this post I will describe how we can use the network isolation capability of the Lab Management in MTM (Microsoft Test Manager), I will also show how to solve some issues I faced, this video is part of my whole guide of “TFS 2010 Enterprise installation and configuration guide” that published on CodePlex, so for more information about the whole installation and configuration, see the guide on CodePlex
The first issue I faced was
TF260073 incompatible architecture error when trying to deploy an environment in Lab Manager
This error can happen for many reasons, it happened for me because the LabAD (Active Directory) machine was not be able to deployed to the host (Hyper V) machine that I assign for the TFS Lab Management, and this was because LabAD (Active Directory) was created on the server at my work and the processor was not supported in my home environment, when I try to change the property of the machine to support different process architecture while it stored on the library, it couldn’t save the changes, so I just copy the VHD file from the library to the desired host and then create a VM based on that VHD and then store the created VM on the library again from this host that will deploy to it later, so my advice if this problem happened that you try to use SCVMM to deploy the machine on the desired host and to solve the problem first and then return to the Lab Management
The second issue I faced was
TF267055: The machine is not ready to run tests because of the following error: Unable to connect to the controller on ‘<TestControllerFQDN>:6901′. Reason: No such host is known. Make sure the test controller is online and the firewall on the test controller is not blocking the connection
This happened because the Test Agent can’t resolve the Test controller machine name, I try many solution, like adding the Test controller machine IP with name in the host file, but no matter what the IP resolved it’s different, we know that any machine that working in isolation network is will has 2 virtual network adapters one for private network and one for external network and everyone has it’s own DNS, so the solution was just add the Test Controller record in the private Domain LabAD (Active Directory) in my case and everything working great.
For any help, just contact me 
For more information about Network isolation on MSDN you can visit the following link
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee830480.aspx#NetworkIsolatedEnvironments
Hi Mohamed,
Do you have or can you point me to any detailed instructions on creating the Domain Controller vm for use in a Network Isolated environment?
The microsoft help is very vague, and doesn’t describe the virtual networking that the vm should use when being created.
I.e.
Should the vm be connected to our network initially?
If so should it use a static ip address or dhcp?
If a static address, should it be a specific address in the network isolation subnet defined in tfs?
etc. etc.
Thanks,
Paul
Hi Paul,
I agree with you about the Microsoft help is very vague, this why I do it as try and error and I share all the errors I face, anyway
Yes the machine will be connected to your network and will has static IP address, consider it as any machine,
don’t concern about the IP and the network isolation IP, you configure the normal IP and the feature configure the Network Isolation IP, so just give the domain a static IP within the range of your network and configure the DNS too.
in a simple word consider this domain as a normal machine connected to your normal network.