Notes from our TFS 2010 upgrade

author Richard Fennell calendar May 17, 2010 · 2 min read · Uncategorised  ·
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Got time today to start our proper internal TFS 2010 rollout. This involves linking up the new TFS to our SharePoint 2010 farm and merging in the contents from 2008 TFS and 2010 RC servers.

All went fairly well, our SharePoint farm caused a few problems with its rather nice redirection feature. This  allows you to gradually move SharePoint content from an older server to a new one. A page is requested from the new server, if it is there it is used, if it is not the content on the old server is used. This caused a couple of problems during the install of TFS that content was not on the new SharePoint server so it redirected to the old one. However, the correct response was that the content was not there and TFS need to install or configure it. Once we realised this was going on there were no major issues with the TFS 2010 installation.

So we had a nice new TFS 2010 install. The next task was to move over content from the 2008 server. Our 2008 server was virtualised so I snaphot’d it, made sure we had a good SQL backup and did an in-place upgrade, and this is where I hit a problem. Our new TFS 2010 install and the 2008 were using the same central SQL server. Our new TFS 2010 install had created a TFS_Configuration DB, I had had the option to put in prefix such as TFS_2010_Configuration but decided I did not need it. This choice came back to bite me. When you do an in-place upgrade of 2008 to 2010 it rolls up all the old TFS DBs into the new structure, creating a new DB, with you guess it, the name TFS_Configuration. If you are doing a new install you can alter this DB name, but this is not the case for a upgrade, you have to use the standard name. So I was a bit stuck. The solution was to:

  1. take my new TFS 2010 server temporarily off line
  2. rename the TFS_Configuration DB
  3. do the in-place upgrade on the new 2008 server to 2010, so it creates as new TFS_Configuration DB
  4. detach the newly upgraded Team Project Collection on the TFS admin console
  5. take my upgraded TFS 2008 server off line
  6. rename its TFS_Configuration DB (if really confident you could delete it)
  7. rename the original TFS_Configuration DB back
  8. restart the main TFS 2010 server
  9. attached the upgraded TPC in the TFS admin console

Simple really !