Team Foundation Server scalability guidelines upgraded

Good news for the larger software development companies. It turns out that team foundation server is more scalable than previously anticipated. The guidance will be changed from supporting 500 users on a single server to 2000!


Excerpt of the posting on bharry’s weblog:


For a while now I’ve been alluding to the fact that we’d be updating our guidance on the size of teams that Team Foundation Server will support.  While we still have some work left to do to pin down the spectrum of team sizes that different classes of servers will support I’m happy to announce some exciting news.  We’re officially changing the guidance from “Teams of up to 500 users” to “Teams of up to 2000 users“!  I’m really thrilled to be able to announce this and proud of the work we have done that has made it possible.  This is going to significantly increase the breadth of customers who can adopt Team Foundation Server as an enterprise wide development platform.


Now ,no scale number is meaningful without the details of the hardware configuration.  The test configuration that we used included:


2 server install (separate application and data tiers)




  • Application tier:  2P 2.8Ghz 4GB
  • Data tier:             4P 2.7Ghz 16GB
  • Disk system:       Direct attach storage, 14 – 15Krpm RAID 0 spindles

Not all companies will need this level of scalability on a single server, though it’s nice to now there is a lot of breating room. Also, being able to do more with less servers will also reduce cost. Not so much for licenses, as Team Foundation Server is priced rather friendly, but having less servers to maintain, upgrade, backup etc will reduce cost also..


So keep up the good work for the tuning team!


Full posting