Configure TFS build to run on subset of build agents

Question

I believe our problem is that we need to run particular builds on a subset of TFS 2010 build agents due to differences in configuration among them. If they were all configured exactly the same, this would not be a problem, however in our particular case this would be far from ideal because we are using the lab management features of TFS, which requires build agents be installed on the target lab VMs. Part of the build includes building documentation using Sandcastle, which requires the Visual Studio SDK, which in turn requires Visual Studio. If we queue a build and it is run against our original build agent, everything is fine, but if it gets run on one of the lab VMs, it fails. If we installed Visual Studio and everything else, it would work, but we would prefer to not install this on our lab VMs because it is not representative of our customers' environment.

So, is there a way that I can set a "build agent affinity", or perhaps another solution? I know that I could create another build controller and separate them that way, but as I understand it, a project collection is associated with only 1 build controller, and we would need the same team project to use multiple build controllers. We are using the full version of TFS 2010.

Thanks in advance for your help!

Answer 1

You should distinguish your different Build Agents with setting the appropriate Tags.
Check here for a nice resource.