Planning for Team Foundation Server

TFS Architecture Overview

Since TFS has a lot of moving parts, I thought I’d give you a picture of how it all fits together. Now before I get a lot of hate mail on this, it is a simplified chart and I’m likely going to leave off someone’s favorite feature. All the big pieces are here though. The purpose is to the give the reader an idea of what we are discussing will fit in the big TFS picture.

There is also a number of different deployment options that will have an effect on the final look of your architecture such as scaled out servers and High Availability (HA) database options. This should serve as a good general reference though as we move through the book as shown in Figure 1-1.

Figure 1- 1. TFS Architecture Reference

Installation Considerations

There are a few pieces of information we need to collect and a few configuration tasks we’ll need to make sure have been completed properly. Here we’ll cover the system requirements and provide a handy checklist you can use so you aren’t hunting around for critical information when you are anxious to begin.

Basic Requirements

One “new” requirement for the last as it is for this release is a 64 bit server OS. I know this is really not “new” news for everyone, but if you haven’t had to install or upgrade an Operating System in a while this may come as a surprise. Also, you may require different hardware to support a 64 Operating System (check with your hardware manufacturer on this). If this applies to you, now you may have that justification you were looking for on ordering that new server.

You may have had no reason to upgrade your Operating System before but to run TFS you will need to have a 64 bit server. Running TFS brings the perfect justification for upgrading your OS!

Another question I’m getting these days for just about everything is if this (Team Foundation Server 2013 in this case) will support a Server Core installation, it will not (more information on the Core Installation Option here http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc771345(v=ws.10).aspx). Just not enough of what TFS needs with these options.