Now running ORCAS Beta 2 on production servers, Upgrade process successfully completed
This weekend we worked day and nights to do the migration of our Production TFS servers to Beta 2 of TFS ORCAS. And we can tell that it was a success!
The upgrade is compared to the "old" install procedures really a breeze. The upgrade guide for you from a V1 TFS server is nothing more than the following steps:
Upgrading a Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server Deployment to Orcas Beta 2
1. Run Beta 2 Setup on the machine running Visual Studio 2005 Application
2. Setup will uninstall Visual Studio 2005 Application and Upgrade the system to Orcas Beta 2.
The new installer really takes care of everything. After the upgrade you get a server that Runs ORCAS, the only thing you need to do is upgrade the SharePoint portal yourself, but everything else get's migrated for you in one single installation step!
Our version control database is about 6GB of size and it took us about 25 minutes to run through the upgrade process. So we managed to migrate the server within an hour!
Great thing is that all other products that depend on TFS still keep working as well. We use products like Team Prise (http://www.teamprise.com/) and Team Plain (http://www.devbiz.com/)(now owned by MS and renamed to Team System Web Access) and after the upgrade they just keep working without any problem as well!
The server can also be accessed through "old" and new visual studio clients. So we can keep teams working with Visual Studio 2005 while other teams can start working with the ORCAS beta 2 bits since they include a go live license. Also the proxy server we have running in Belgium did not require an upgrade. It will just keep running against the ORCAS server, which made the upgrade process very well manageable as well. See Buck Hodges his post on the compatibility issues you might run into regarding the build. But that did not apply to our build since we currently have a separate build out of band of TFS that does integrate with TFS. (We still use NAnt but will upgrade this within the next few months to MS & Team Build)
So I don't know if there are already other companies running their production servers on ORCAS Beta 2 (besides Microsoft itself of course) but I think we can state the we at info support are now one of the very few partners that are already running at the bleeding edge of technology and are enjoying all the goodness that brings 🙂 (Especially the performance gains are impressive, and I love the offline feature)
I want to express my thanks to the Microsoft development team who have been very supportive in the process (Especially Adam Bar, Buck Hodges and Aaron Hallberg) who provided us with all kinds of great help especially fixing our extensions on the TFS build and helping us with a nasty bug we hit in Beta 2 I wrote about in a previous post.
Also Special thanks to Martijn Beenes as he is the engineer in my team that did most of the testing of the B2 bits the past two weeks and fixing the issues we hit.
Some Tips and tricks for you when you decide to upgrade:
· Create a clone of the production server you want to upgrade first and test the upgrade process there to ensure it all goes well. (At least that is what we did several times and we found that a very nice way to do a dry run on the actual server databases without the risk of bringing real production to a halt when something goes wrong) see: Martijns post on this
· If you have extensions on TFS build, tests them very well since the build feature of TFS changed quite a bit. If you did create build extensions yourself and programmed against the old build OM, I can recommend you the following resources to check.
Download your own copy of the beta here and give it a spin!
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