Upgrading from TFS2005 to TFS 2008 'Orcas' Beta 2

Today I decided to bite the bullet and upgrade our 'live' TFS installation to 2008 Beta2, now there is support from Microsoft. The only reason I have delayed this long has been we have been involved in the delivery of a big project and I did not want to take the TFS server down for any reason.

Our TFS installation is dual server, the data tier (DT) running on our central SQL2005 64bit server and the application tier (AT) on a virtual server as a VPC. I have kept the AT virtual as it is easy to backup.

So the first thing of note that surprised me is that you do the upgrade only from the AT. Before I read the installation notes I had assumed you would update the DT and then the AT like the original installation.

Anyway I ran the setup.exe on the AT, it found a few warnings but they were all down to the fact I was running on a VPC (warnings over CPU performance, memory and disk size), so I continued with the upgrade gave it some user IDs and pressed start and it progressed OK first installing .NET 3.5 then TFS 2008.

During the TFS 2008 upgrade I got two errors that stopped the setup with a 'retry or cancel' option. In both cases I managed to fix the issues and a retry worked. This is what I had to do to fix the problems:

  • Error 29109 Team Foundation Report Server Configuration -  All this turned out to be was a timeout. On the AT I opened the URL http://localhost/reports in a browser (this took a long time for some reason) but I did eventually get the usual reporting services page. I then retried the step in the upgrade tool and it continued fine.
  • Error 28925. TFServerStatusValidator - Basically this means the setup program cannot access http://localhost:8080/services/v1.0/ServerStatus.asmx on the AT. If you manually run the URL you get a generic 'page not found' error. On looking the the event log I was that an ISAPI filter authenticationfilter.dll for the TFS web site could not be loaded. Interesting the path it was trying to loaded was for TFS2005, and of course this file no longer existed. I then remembered that we had installed this ISAPI filter when we had TFS 1.0 and were trying to get HTTPS connectivity working, so I just deleted the ISAPI filter entry, I then checked I could start the URL in a browser and then tried the step of the setup and it continued OK

When all this was done the server was rebooted and it had been upgraded server.

The next step will be to upgrade the AT from WSS 2.0 to WSS3.0 then move all the Sharepoint bits our central MOSS 2007 server, thus making the AT little more than a web server.