Lab Management error: TF259115

While preparing a demonstration of Lab Management today I experienced an error I hadn’t seen before. The error message occurred when I created a new Virtual Environment and attempted to deploy to an existing host group using Lab Center.

The error message looked like this:

image

and the text was as follows:

TF259115: Team Foundation Server could not find any suitable host to deploy the virtual machine: Win2K8R2x64IIS.

More details: All the hosts in the host group had one or more of the following inadequacies:

Memory requirement of the virtual machine(s) exceeds the available host resources. The placement policy for this host group is set to be conservative and hence virtual machines that are in stopped state are also accounted as consuming host resources.

In this case I had a demo server with 8Gb RAM with only one running virtual machine using just 1.5Gb of the available RAM. The new environment I was trying to deploy had a single server in it with just 1.2Gb allocated. As the error indicated, I needed to change the “placement policy” for the host group from conservative to um? non-conservative? I looked in every nook and cranny I could find in SCVMM but couldn’t find anything about changing the placement policy.

After putting out a call for help, Deepraj Dixit, a developer in the Lab Management team came to my rescue with the following information.

“The lab environment placement policy is an attribute of host group in lab management object model. At present, there is no UI way to change this setting. You can use the TFSCONFIG command as below:

TfsConfig Lab /hostgroup /CollectionName: /Edit /Name: /LabEnvironmentPlacementPolicy:Aggressive</font>

I logged onto my TFS Server, started a command prompt and went to work. You can see in the following screen shot that I made the change and then confirmed it using the “/list” option to make sure the change had taken effect.

image(Click image to enlarge)

You can find out more about the TFSConfig Lab /HostGroup command line options at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd547199(VS.100).aspx