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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As I’ve discussed in the past, we work VERY hard in this release to really improve the ease of installing TFS. We’ve done everything from making more components optional, reducing prereqs, configuring prereqs for you, providing better defaults, implementing better diagnostic checks, making configuration serviceable and more. It’s been a lot of work but I think it has really paid off in really transforming the TFS install experience from one that is very long and most people dread to one that’s pretty short, easy and problem free.
Part of our “secret” to doing all of this has been intensive instrumentation. We’ve used both Dr. Watson and SQM to collect tons of information from Betas, LCTPs and the RC to understand what people are doing and what problems they are having. We’ve also used blogs, forums, emails and support to follow up diligently on virtually every report of problems to try to get to the bottom of it and make some improvement that will reduce or eliminate the chance that someone else hits in the future.
I wanted to share with you some of the results. Here’s some data on RC installation and upgrade success rates (as reported by our telemetry). Some definitions:
Initial Success – Means the user succeeded the first time they tried.
Overall Success – Means the user failed one or more times but ultimately succeeded. The failures can come from something as simple as trying to install the 64-bit version of TFS on a 32-bit OS (which quite a few people have tried over the various releases :)) to more involved issues like permissions not being right or misconfigured prereqs, etc.
Failure – Means as best we can tell, the user was not able to get the installation working.
Now all of this is a bit fuzzy due to limitations imposed by privacy restrictions. We have to use indirect mechanisms to tell if two attempts are from the same “user”. We actually can’t collect information on who the user is. So it’s very possible that some number of the failures were actually Overall Successes but we weren’t able to tell that the ultimate success was the same user as the failure.
Here’s the success rates for fresh installs for the RC:
And here’s the success rates for upgrades for the RC:
Here’s the versions people were upgrading from:
We have been able to identify and improve several issues that lead to the failures on the RC. We are expecting that the RTM success rate will be even better. By contrast in TFS 2008, the success rates were 5-10% lower than this.
Here’s some other random and somewhat interesting statistics from our SQM data:
Operating System TFS 2010 is installed on:
This is the first release we’ve supported installing on a client OS and a client OS is the #1 install target and a total of almost 37% of installs are on client OSes.
32 vs 64 bit installs:
This is the first release we’ve supported 64-bit OSes and almost 2/3rds of installs are on them.
And here’s how much memory people have in their TFS machines:
Brian
It looks quite interesting especially on 32 vs 64 and memory part. Even though they might not get any benefit from using 64 bit as vast majority of machines do not even have 4G of memory, it looks like people are in favor of 64 bit system. It looks to me like people are more of in a testing mode rather than setting up a production environment.
I greatly appreciate all of the effort put into getting this process smoothed out. I am very impressed at the installation tool - I LOVE IT! Upgrading from 2005 to 2008 wasn't easy.. Upgrading from 2008 to Beta 2 was a piece of cake! Beta 2 to RC was nothing at all! :) Of course, I installed on a single server system - even so... The experience is giving me a great deal of confidence in tackling the production server when the final release comes out. I really like all of the stops in the process - the configuration being separated from the file installations; the verification of the data collected by the configuration params. Very impressive!
Thanks so much for all you do!! :)
I think it's fair to say that a much higher percentage of people are in a testing mode now than will be true after RTM.
Thanks for the kind words Jennifer :)
I agree with Jennifer. We're testing 2010 and looking to move to it from Sourcesafe (as a very small team). The installation was really painless compared to previous versions, and I was able to get up and running easily.
Great work!
I have been playing with various installation scenarios (basic installation, single server, dual server, multiple server with MOSS in a separated machine). The installation experience in TFS 2010 is great. Easy even for a kid. Now it is given the flexibility to install what company needs and, in a later time, add the rest (reporting and SharePoint). It is also possible to install TFS in a Client OS, … In a nutshell: This is a great advance.
The only point I think should be simplify is the installation and configuration for MOOS to get benefit of dashboard excel reports
I agree, installing MOSS is quite complicated. At some level I wish the MOSS team would invest more in making it a better experience. However, we're looking at building some add ons to make installing and configuring MOSS for TFS easier.
Hi,
We are using TFS2008 for test case management and defect tracking purpose. Can you please let me know what steps have to be performed exactly in order to move the project to TFS2010?
Regards,
Saema
There are many possible orders depending on what you want to do. Are you moving hardware when you upgrade or upgrading in place? What version of Sharepoint do you currently have installed?, for example. The TFS installation guide has very detailed steps for the numerous possible upgrade paths depending on how you have installed and configured TFS. Here's a link to the doc: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=2d531219-2c39-4c69-88ef-f5ae6ac18c9f
Hi Brian,
I simply want to move all the data that I have on TFS2008 to TFS2010 server.
I really love how you analyze the stats like this.
Most interesting the 60%+ on 64bit.... I think it justifies no 32bit in 2012 :-)
Do you receive all the same stats for people installing RTM?
Adam
www.adamcogan.com.au
It's certainly something we'll consider. I want to be thoughtful about the role of the TFS Basic install wizard. It is intended to allow lots of non-traditional TFS uses. As you can see above Win7 is now the single largest TFS install platform. We'll be watching the trends over the next few months and then making some decisions about what our platform support matrix will be for the next release.
I think you guys did an excellent job with the installation. However there was a big piece omitted or I'm just not finding the right documentation. I would like to see some data on "Overall Success" at migrating from 2005 or 2008 AND getting the advantage of the new templates. Sure we upgraded successfully to new hardware and x64--technically--but now we're looking at another two weeks of configuring each project to get the templates upgraded for each project MANUALLY (even though we haven't modified the originals). Not to mention following the docs still doesn't get me equal functionality on my old projects compared to new ones. After the good experience of upgrading TFS, enabling the new templates to take advantage of the processes improvements on existing projects is VERY disappointing. The numbers here are great, but they only tell half of the story of an installation/upgrade.