Using Friendly DNS Names in Visual Studio 2010 Lab Management

If you’ve spent some time with Lab Management, specifically where you’ve leveraged Network Isolation you will have noticed the nice fully qualified domain names assigned to the external network adapter identified in the diagram below as “Computer name:”.

System info

If you want to create easier to remember names for your VMs you could create some CNAMEs in your DNS so you can have a name like iis-01.dev.lab.tfs.domain.local instead of VSLM-58-62ff5f0e-3584-4fed-b726-5741bb62e659.domain.local of course this is quite a bit of effort if you have many environments and machines or recreate your environment.

Lab Center Environment

In my DNS Manager I have created a few subdomains as containers for virtual machine friendly names in Lab Management Environments.

DNS Manager | Subdomains

Now that I have those subdomains I just need a really easy method to create CNAMEs based on the computers in my environments so I can get entries like these created for me.

Alias (CNAME)

I created a Powershell Script to iterate through a Lab Environment for a Team Project. In Lab Center I have enabled the display of the ID column for the Environments which I will use later in the Lab URI.

Environments with ID

Here is a sample command-line:

.\CreateCnamesForLabEnvironment.ps1 -dnsServer ws08srv -flzone “domain.local” -aSuffix “lab.tfs.domain.local” -labUri “vstfs:///LabManagement/LabEnvironment/56” -tpcUrl “http://localhost/tfs/DefaultCollection”

Here is the Powershell script, use at your own risk.  Let me know if you find it useful. 
The script ignores the machine configured as the Domain Controller in the environment as it has no external adapter defined. The script gets the internal computer name to use as the friendly name.


# CreateCnamesForLabEnvironment.ps1
# helper function
function isNullOrEmpty {
param (
[string] $str
)
if ([system.string]::IsNullOrEmpty($str))
{
return $true
}
else
{
return $false
}
}
# http://blogs.technet.com/b/heyscriptingguy/archive/2010/09/13/manage-dns-in-a-windows-environment-by-using-powershell.aspx
function newcname {
param(
[string]$dnsServer,
[string]$flzone,
[string]$labComputer,
[string]$alias
)
## split the hostname from the FQDN
$server = $dnsServer -split "\."
$rr = [WmiClass]"\\$($server[0])\root\MicrosoftDNS:MicrosoftDNS_ResourceRecord"
##
## create CNAME
$text = "$alias IN CNAME $labComputer"
$rr.CreateInstanceFromTextRepresentation($dnsServer, $flzone, $text)
}

if (-not(isNullOrEmpty($computerName)))
{
if (-not(isNullOrEmpty($internalComputerName)))
{
Write-Host "Creating a CNAME for "$computerName
Write-Host "Alias (CNAME):"$alias
newcname $dnsServer $flzone $computerName $alias
}
}
}
}
else {
Write-Host "The Lab Environment specified is not running!"
Write-Host "Lab URI: "$labUri
Write-Host "Environment Name: "$labEnv.Name
Write-Host "Environment State: "$labEnv.StatusInfo.State
}