Moving your Team Foundation Server
Yesterday I helped a client move their Team Foundation Server from a virtual machine to a physical machine.
The MSDN help on the topic of moving your Team Foundation Server is truly excellent-- my compliments to the team that put it together! It can be a little difficult, however, to tell which scenario applies to your Team Foundation Server move. Here are some guidelines gleaned from the MSDN documentation:
- the hardware is changing
You're moving to a different server in the same workgroup.
You're moving to another single-tier server in the same domain.
You're moving to another dual-tier server in the same domain.
- the environment is changing
You're changing to a different domain.
The name of the machine changed.
You're moving from a workgroup config to a domain config.
- You're scaling up to a dual-server configuration
You're adding a new, second server to act as the data tier and increase capacity.
Unfortunately, our move was a mixture of type 1 (the hardware changed) and 2 (the machine name changed). Personally, I think this will be a very common scenario-- the client will have to move the server in the exact same way in another month!
We were able to get things to work by piecing together the relevant steps from each document.
The good news is that the majority of state in Team Foundation Server is stored in the database. Getting the database exported and imported to the new target machine is half the battle, and that part is quite easy. But there are a number of places that the machine name is stored in the database, too.
To make things even more confusing, there are two guides for restoring the databases:
Anyway, I highly recommend printing out each document that you think may apply to your move, and carefully thinking through each step (preferably with another person) before you start. You can't mechanically follow the MSDN docs unless you fit the scenario perfectly, so you'll have to read through and pick and choose what you need to do.
I know, all that pesky thinking again..