Changing your team foundation deployment architecture after installation

Someone sent me a mail asking whether it is possible to split up or combine the application and data tier of Team Foundation Server to one or multiple physical servers.

The answer is that this is possible using the TfsAdminUtil.exe tool located in Program FilesMicrosoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation ServerTools.

This tool accepts the command ActivateAT to make the local machine an application tier.

The RenameDT command makes it possible to connect the current Application Tier server to a different Data Tier. So this command can be used to split up the AT and DT by installing the data tier on a different server.

The challenge remains to get the data from the old to the new DT. A backup-restore off the ‘old’ DT to the ‘new’ DT could do the trick of migrating the DT, but I have not fully tested that scenario, so if you run into problems please let me know.