In-place migration from TFS 2010 to TFS 2015

Question

I have a question about in-place upgrading from Team Foundation Server 2010 to Team Foundation Server 2015 Our current situation contains the following software versions: - Windows Server 2008 R2 - SQL Server 2008 R2 - Team foundation Server 2010

We would like to perform an in-place upgrade of this server to the following new versions. - Windows Server 2012 R2 - SQL Server 2014 - Team Foundation Server 2015

It is a single server installation on a VMWare environment. Adding additional resources is not a problem. So for that reason we would like to go for an in-place upgrade.

With the information I found on https://msdn.microsoft.com/library/vs/alm/tfs/administer/requirements it does not seem to be possible with our current SQL version to upgrade to TFS 2015 in one go. Should we first upgrade to TFS 2012 (which still supports SQL Server 2008 R2)? Then upgrade to SQL 2012 SP1, then TFS 2015..and so on.

Or should it be easier in our situation to migrate the TFS 2010 databases to an new server with all the latest versions and then upgrade the databases (and so not performing an in-place upgrade after all)?

There is a lot of documentation describing various migration scenario's so that is causing some confusion.

Can someone give us some suggestions or answer on what is the best way forward?

Unrivalled

Answer 1

What you could do is:

1. Uninstall TFS from the current server
2. Uninstall SQL Server on the current server
3. Install SQL Server 2014 on it
4. Attach the databases to the SQL Server 2014
5. Install TFS 2015 and walk through the upgrade wizard.

It's sort of an in-place upgrade. Indeed be aware of the Sharepoint issue, it will be your pressing reason to make in in-between upgrade stop along the way, should you need it.

I see many client de-coupling Sharepoint from TFS anyway, as the Sharepoint functionality is rarely used, or even known.

Britanybritches

Agreed. Sharepoint is usually the painful part of any TFS migration, and I almost never see anyone using it. – Pulsation

Hi Jesse, Thanks for you response. We indeed don't use SharePoint although it is installed and configured. I presume in an upgrade from TFS 2010 to TFS 2015 with the upgrade wizard we can simply ignore it and uninstall any remaining components of WSS 3.0 after the complete upgrade has finished. Also when upgrading from TFS 2010 to TFS 2015 will the 'old' build XAML files and build definitions be maintained and also upgraded or do we have to create the new TFS 2015 style builds from scratch? – Unrivalled

You need to disconnect your team projects and remove Sharepoint prior to upgrade. – Britanybritches

Old XAML build will stay old XAML builds. Unless you have extensive customizations, they should just work. – Britanybritches

Hi Jesse, Apologies or my late response. We'll be trying out the upgrade process very soon now as you described it. Also will be removing Sharepoint first. Thanks. – Unrivalled

Answer 2

Something else to consider. If you're using any of the sharepoint functionality in TFS 2010, and you want to keep the stuff stored there, then you'll probably want to upgrade to TFS 2012 anyway. TFS 2010 uses WSS 3.0 and TFS 2015 uses the latest version of sharepoint express. There is no direct migration from WSS 3.0 to the latest version so you'll need to use the bundled version in TFS 2012 as an intermediary upgrade.

If sharepoint isn't an issue then I'd suggest building out new infrastructure and migrating the TFS databases. This will be easier and IMHO has a couple of other benefits.

• you can do a test migration to flush out any additional issues
• get some timings so you know how long the real migration will take

Zymogenic

Hi James, Thanks for your response. We have indeed installed/configured WSS 3.0 but we never started using it. So I presume when migrating to a new TFS 2015 we can simply ignore it? – Unrivalled

Yep, if you're not using the sharepoint stuff (project portal) then you can ignore it. If that's the case then setting up a new server will save you the pain of migrating to 2012 just to upgrade the SQL server and then upgrading to 2015. – Zymogenic