Everything you want to know about Visual Studio ALM and Farming
Brian Harry is a Microsoft Technical Fellow working as the Product Unit Manager for Team Foundation Server. Learn more about Brian.
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Now that Team Foundation Server 2008 keys/media/downloads are available, I'm seeing lots more questions about various scenarios. I'm going to try to capture all of the less obvious issue here:
You have TFS 2008 Trial Edition installed and you want to upgrade to TFS Standard Edition
You need to go to Add/Remove programs and click Change/Uninstall on your TFS installation. This will display a dialog in which you should click on "Upgrade". You can then enter a new product key. If you bought full packaged product (and actually got media) you will have the key you need in the material you purchased. It's not so simple for volume license customers because they don't actually get media - they download the bits from the volume licensing web site and the key is not obvious. The "official" policy is that you are supposed to call Customer Support and ask for your product key. There is a simpler way, if you choose. If you look in your download for a folder called "AT" (stands for Application Tier). You will find a file called "setup.sdb". Open that file in notepad (or any text editor). Search for "[Product Key]?. The next line is your product key. You can enter this string into the dialog presented from Add/Remove programs and click OK. Your TFS server is now fully upgraded to Standard Edition.
You have TFS 2008 Trial Edition installed and you want to upgrade to Workgroup Edition
You must uninstall trial (your data will not be lost - although backups are always advisable) and install Workgroup Edition.
You have TFS 2008 Workgroup Edition installed and you want to upgrade to TFS Standard Edition
This scenario is intended to work like #1 (upgrade trial to standard), However, there is a bug that makes this a bit tricky. If you use Add/Remove Programs to enter a new product key, you will find that the product key field is greyed out - this is not "by design". I've been told that if you run setup from the media (rather than Add/Remove Programs), the ID field will not be read-only. Alternatively, you can uninstall Workgroup Edition and then install Standard Edition. As far as getting the proper product key (for volume license users), see # 1 above.
You have TFS Beta 2 or Release Candidate
TFS 2008 Beta 2 and Release Candidates releases are about to expire (the RC expires in the next week or two and the Beta expires in mid March). Please make sure you upgrade VERY SOON. You can upgrade to TFS 2008 Trial Edition, Workgroup Edition or Standard Edition. You will perform the upgrade by unintalling the Beta or RC and then installing your chosen edition. If they actually expire, you have a 1 time only shot at extending it for 30-days (using the new TFSVersionDetection tool that you will find in this blog post).
You have TFS 2005 and want to upgrade to TFS 2008
As a general rule, this is straight forward. You just uninstall TFS 2005 (all your data will be preserved) and install TFS 2008. New client and old clients will both work. By far the trickiest part will be upgrading from Sharepoint 2.0 to Sharepoint 3.0 (2007) or MOSS 2007. My best advice is read the corresponding upgrade instructions (ours and/or WSS). The TFS installation guide is here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=FF12844F-398C-4FE9-8B0D-9E84181D9923&displaylang=en. And here's a reference to the Sharepoint upgrade instructions: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office/sharepointserver/bb421259.aspx
Brian
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It would be really helpful if guidance was present that would allow me to 'test drive' a 2008 upgrade scenario. It may just be a combination of restoring TFS to a differenttly named server and then performing an upgrade, perhaps starting here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms252516(VS.80).aspx
TFS is too important to us to engage in an upgrade and then find ourselves on the phone for a few hours with premier working on why the upgrade failed or rollback scenarios. We need to identify those up front as much is as practically possible. (This is meant as a compliment to TFS!)
What about from TFS 2005? Might as well make this page definitive.
Now that the TFS media is starting to show up in our MSDN subscriptions and product keys are orderable,
OK, I have added a bullet for upgrading from TFS 2005.
I have reviewed the TFS 2008 (we have WSS 2.0 and want to go to WSS 3.0). I agree with the earlier comment: "TFS is too important to us to engage in an upgrade and then find ourselves on the phone for a few hours with premier working on why the upgrade failed or rollback" With existing documentation the upgrade has every appearance of a pending disaster!
Hi - Thanks so much for the great information. We have one server with TFS 2005 and loads of history on it. We need to move to a new server and we want to run TFS 2008.
Can we accomplish this by just copying the databases to the new server and then installing TFS 2008? We tried using the TFS to TFS migration tool for two weeks and that didn't work since the tool has too many bugs with branch/merge/renames right now. That tool is not ready for prime time... unfortunately for us.
Can you point me to steps to do this? I'm seeing conflicting informtaion on the internet about how this is done.
Our advice on this is always to first move the TFS 2005 install to the new server, then upgrade it. Our instructions for moving a TFS 2005 install are here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms404879(VS.80).aspx The upgrade should be easy and is described in the install docs.
The truth is that the hardest part is moving WSS and Reporting Services.
mistype in the title of this blog: How DO I upgrade to TFS 2008?
Thanks,
I tried doing a restore-based move in combination with an upgrade from a TFS 2005 Workgroup Edition to the 2008 toolset. After three weeks of two full server rebuilds per day I gave up and built the new server and used the tfpt "online" command to restore a series of snapshots from the old server.
By "in combination with" I mean "in the same three-week period". I tried every combination and permutation of move and upgrade steps I could think of -- and I have a degree in mathematics -- but each failed in a different way.
The reasons I wanted to move along with upgrading included the fact that there were spooky things happening in the old server. That may have something to do with the lack of success but be forewarned, it is not (always) the smooth sailing described here. You have to parse the instructions dilligently and do everything exactly right. Even then the end result may not work and good luck figuring out why.
I'm a little bit miffed about the wasted time and considerably more annoyed about losing my change history details. But I appreciate the new tools and I wouldn't have you stand still. If we could get 95% of the progress with 40% of the pain I might take that deal.
I really like the merge exploration screenshots. Could we persuade your guys to work on a dependency visualizer for native code projects? :-)
johnw, I started a thread about guidance for "testing" upgrades internally. Everyone thinks it's a good idea. There are many ways to do it depending on what your constraints are. Do you clone everything or do you have a separate WSS farm that doesn't get cloned? Do you run the clone in an isolated network so that you can reuse the same machine names without conflict? Do you shutdown the production machine during the "test"?
We have a procedure we use here for doing our own upgrades (our upgrade validation process generally takes a couple of weeks). The team is debating best practices approaches and I'll post something if/when we publish some guidance. If you have input on how you'd like it to work, I'd love to hear it.
Steve, I'm very sorry you had such difficulty. A restore based move along with an upgrade is complicated and I generally recommend strongly against it - I recommend move first and get working, then upgrade or upgrade first and get working, then move.
The upgrade process itself is generally pretty straight forward but the move complicates it significantly. We are working on dramatically simplifying the move scenario. A great tool for helping in these kinds of situations is the TFS BPA (Best Practices Analyzer) in the TFS Power Tools December 2007 release. It will scan your system pretty thoroughly and tell you what it thinks is misconfigured. Most people report that it drops multi-hour diagnosis sessions to minutes.
Thanks for the feedback on the dependency visualizer for native code. I'll pass it on.
I just spoke with Customer Support for Volume Licensing and they told me I need to contact my reseller and have them order me a CD so I can get the product key. They stated they cannot generate Team Foundation Server keys. We installed the Trial version of 2008 so we could update the key later.
Scott, I’m sorry you’re having problems getting a key from support. Needless to say, the problem is on our end - we had an internal miscommunication between the product team and support that caused the problem. We had a breakdown in execution that delayed the implementation of support processes to supply keys to customers.
We identified the issues and are actively addressing them to ensure Support can service our customers and supply keys to update TFS from Trial to release version. It will take 2-3 weeks (2/8) to implement the solution and train our support reps to provide proactive support and TFS keys.
In the meantime, if your TFS trial is due to expire in the next 3 weeks we have a couple of options to ensure you don’t have a disruption in TFS availability:
- Extend your trial by30 days using the using the TFSVersionDetection utility
- Pull the key from VL media. You can obtain VL media from a) your media kit or b) download it from MVLS (MS VL Server – your company’s VL administrator should have access to the download server)
If neither of the options above are possible and your trial is about to expire, email me @ efeaglerATmicrosoft.com and I will work with you to obtain a key to update your trial version.
My sincere apologies for this misstep and any inconvenience it has caused you and other customers.
- Eric