granth's blog : VSTS Planning & Tracking

VSTS Pioneer TFS2010 Dogfood Server: Upgrading

grantholliday — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 08:58:00 GMT

(See this summary on the VSTS Pioneer dogfood server and all the other posts.)

One of the major goals of the Pioneer Team Foundation Server is to upgrade it to early builds so that we can get some “bake time” with them and feel confident with what we’re releasing to customers. Since we spun up the server, we’ve done two successful upgrades and we’re already planning the next one:

July 1st – Initial installation of Beta 1 build
August 29 – Upgrade to 8/22 build from the VSTS branch
September 17 – Upgrade to 9/17 build from the Beta 2 branch (yes, the build dropped at 5PM and we used it to upgrade at 6PM)
November – Upgrade to a post-Beta2 build

The process of testing the upgrades on a copy of our database is just as important as running the upgrade itself. With our interesting dogfood topology of a dedicated SQL server, NLB/multiple application tiers, a dedicated MOSS server, virtual machines and use of virtual DNS names, we find some interesting bugs that we’re able to fix before things are locked down for shipping.

There’s no whitepaper on “How to Dogfood” at Microsoft, so our process for deploying perpetual upgrades is something that just kind of happened. Here’s basically what we do:

Depending on where we are in the cycle and the amount of churn in the code base, we might add another iteration or skip one. What’s most interesting about this process, is that it’s driven by the end date. Based on the product schedule, we know when our windows of opportunity are for upgrading and we work back from then.

Tips for upgrading

Here are some tips to consider when planning your own upgrades:

Hardware – Get your production & pre-production servers in place early. Getting new hardware or re-configuring existing hardware usually has a long lead time. Make sure that you’ve also got enough storage space.
Start fresh – If at all possible, give yourself the best chance at success by starting with a fresh box. Sure, plenty of products support in-place upgrades & clean uninstalls – but in my experience, flattening the box and starting fresh lays a good foundation for the future.
Backups – Organize a copy of your production backups that you can test the upgrade with. Not only does it give you peace of mind that your backups work, it also helps you line up the DBA’s for when it’s time to do the real upgrade.
Start with the latest OS – If you start with Windows 2008 R2 now, it’s one less OS upgrade (and downtime) you’ll have to do in the future. It also means you’ll be on 64-bit, which is a very good thing.
Virtualization – We run our 3x Application Tiers as virtual machines with no problems whatsoever. This is great for when we’re installing pre-beta copies of the .NET framework that don’t have clean uninstalls yet. In our last upgrade we just turned off the old application tiers and spun up three fresh ones. You can treat AT’s as throwaways in a TFS2010 NLB topology, since there is no state stored on them.
Dry-Runs – Run through your plan and make sure everything is going to work. Review it with others and get their feedback.
Have a test plan – Once you’ve done the upgrade, you need to be sure that everything is back online and working as expected. Checkin, Checkout, Open work item, Save work item, Web Access, Sharepoint, Reports, Cube, Alerts, Monitoring, Builds, etc.
Do pre-requisites ahead of time – For example, to install SQL2008 you need to have .NET3.5 and Windows Installer 4.5 both installed first and both of these require a reboot. If you plan to do one on the first weekend and the other on the second weekend, it means that you don’t waste time during your more important SQL upgrade waiting for reboots.
Do one thing at a time – This is an extension of the last point. Let’s say you’re moving from a single-server TFS2008 SP1 on SQL2005 and Windows 2003 to a dual-server TFS2010 on SQL2008 SP1 and Windows 2008 R2. If it were me, I’d take it in steps: upgrade SQL, make sure everything still works, move to dual-server, check again, upgrade to TFS2010. The more steps you try and bundle together, the higher your risk of failure.

Upgrade logistics

I’ve been involved with at least 5 major upgrades this year and here are some things I’ve learnt from running them:

Book a conference room
- This is the single most valuable thing you can do. Try and get anybody who is actually doing any steps in the upgrade (DBA< IT, Helpdesk, etc) to come to the room.
- Have a spare computer or project your own desktop on the screen. This is useful for synchronizing with others in the room, running ‘ping –t’ when a server reboots and doing “group debugging” sessions when problems happen.
Setup a “party line” conference call. Invite anybody who wants to “listen in” to join. Invite your manager.

It’s also useful for anybody who you might need help from to have these details. If things go south, you don’t waste time trying to setup a conference call – it’s already there.

Setup a live meeting / desktop sharing session. Invite anybody who wants to be a “fly on the wall” to join.
- Sure, you can log a bug that says “when I clicked on X on screen Y, setup blew up” and people might believe you. But if you’re sharing your desktop and other people see it happen, then you have some people to back you up.
- (I’ve been meaning to do a screen recording of our upgrades, but various technology problems have prevented it each time – I think it would be useful for reviewing and improving the process for next time)
Setup an “on call / escalation” list. Find out who you need to call if you have problems with one of your dependent systems. The last thing you want to be doing is sitting on hold to a L1 helpdesk if your server doesn’t reboot cleanly or something.
Send at least 3 notifications to users of the downtime
- 1st Notice – Give as much notice as possible so people can plan milestones around the date. Even if it’s not set in stone yet, people would rather know about it and have it cancelled than to find out at the last minute.
- 2nd Notice – 7 days or on the Monday before a weekend upgrade is good for this.
- 3rd Notice – On the day of the upgrade (or 24 hours before if it’s a weekend), send another one.
- Guidelines: Make sure you describe what the impact to users is, any actions they need to take and where they can go to get future status updates and support.
Provide regular status to stakeholders. Start an email thread and trickle through progress as it happens. By keeping them informed, you buy their trust and their support when things don’t go as planned.

Planning your own upgrade

Brian Keller has a great post on how to Get ready to “go live” with Team Foundation Server 2010 beta 2! He includes two useful documents:

Overview presentation (.PPTX)

Detailed checklist (.DOCX)

I’m also going to share with you a copy of the generic deployment plan template that I’ve been using for the Pioneer upgrades.

Deployment Plan Template(.XLSX)

Planning, testing and upgrading to these new releases has been a fun experience and it’s a bonus when everything goes smoothly. It’s great to see our experiences influence the product and make it the best release yet.

VSTS Pioneer TFS2010 Dogfood Server: Statistics September 2009

grantholliday — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 07:13:18 GMT

(See this summary on the VSTS Pioneer dogfood server and all the other posts.)

September was a busy month for dogfooding TFS – all of the VSTS team were completely moved across and on 9/17 we upgraded to an almost final TFS2010 Beta 2 build. Here are the numbers from the end of September:

Recent Users: 887

Version Control

Files & Folders: 10,722,118
Compressed File Sizes (MB): 263,350
Uncompressed File Sizes (MB): 773,731
Checkins: 23,369
Pending Changes: 55,697
Local Copies: 303,331,190

Work Item Tracking

It looks like I don’t have the work item tracking stats for September – I’ll have them next month.

Commands (last 2 weeks in September)

Work Item opens: 113,128
Work Item queries: 101,203
Work Item updates: 23,653
Checkins: 1,855
Uploads: 6.622
Shelves: 2,402
Downloads: 216,452
Gets: 30,201

Table sizes

One of the interesting metrics that I’m also tracking is how our tables and indexes are growing on the disks. Here’s the top 10 for this month:

Table	Rows	Reserved (MB)	Data (MB)	Index (MB)	Unused (MB)
tbl_Content	5,915,547	277,260	275,129	4	2,127
tbl_LocalVersion	303,331,190	81,562	44,789	36,574	199
Attachments	63,783	11,928	11,908	13	7
tbl_Version	12,129,564	3,418	1,031	2,369	17
WorkItemLongTexts	2,728,618	3,314	2,533	777	5
tbl_VersionedItem	15,754,176	2,983	1,598	1,382	3
WorkItemsWere	1,239,831	2,482	1,617	863	2
tbl_PropertyValue	33,293,914	1,320	523	793	4
tbl_File	5,717,981	722	442	266	14

VSTS Pioneer TFS2010 Dogfood Server – Hardware & Topology

grantholliday — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 18:23:00 GMT

(This blog post is part of a series of posts on the new VSTS Pioneer TFS dogfood server.)

While running the main TFS server for ~3,500 users in Developer Division we got a pretty good idea of the hardware required to support our enormous number of files, local versions & branches.

We knew that:

our SQL Server load patterns were very IO intensive
our SQL Server load patterns were very CPU intensive
our disk usage will grow by about 300% per year
the number of operations the server performs will increase

Servers

We wanted to purchase and setup hardware that was flexible enough and designed to scale as our needs do. For this reason we settled on two identical servers that are part of the Microsoft IT recommended systems for our needs:

HP ProLiant DL580G5 (room to add two more processors & upgradeable to 256GB RAM)
Windows 2008 x64 SP2
2x 6-core Intel Xeon X7460 2.66Ghz processors
32GB RAM
QLogic QLE2460 4Gbps Fiber Channel Host Bus Adapter (SAN connection)

According to Joe Chang who studies SQL Server performance, the “The X7460 (Dunnington) is a clear winner at 4-way for the high-call volume apps.” The 6-core CPUs also offer a pretty significant performance boost over the older quad-core CPUs:

“On TPC-C, the 7460 six core generated a 34% edge over the quad core AMD and 56% advantage over the quad core X3750”, and
“On TPC-E, the six core showed a 49% edge over the older quad core”

Virtual Machines

We are running 5 virtual machines at the moment with almost identical configurations. Since we’ll be constantly upgrading things like the .NET CLR that often don’t support build-to-build upgrades or clean uninstall, running the application tiers as VM’s makes perfect sense. It also improves our rollback story if we have a failed upgrade. (More about upgrade in a future post).

VM	Purpose	Configuration
AT01, AT02, AT03	TFS Application Tier	Windows Server 2008 R2 4 Virtual processors 4GB RAM 2 Virtual NICs 1 VHD for C$ 1 VHD for version control cache
MIRROR	TFS-TFS Connector tool runs here	Windows Server 2008 RTM 4 Virtual processors 4GB RAM 1 Virtual NIC 1 VHD for C$ 1 VHD for version control temporary workspace
MOSS	Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 SP2 (Complete install) Web Front End, Excel Services, Search Services & Shared Services Provider	Windows Server 2008 R2 4 Virtual processors 4GB RAM 1 Virtual NIC 1 VHD for C$ Databases reside on physical SQL server

Storage

Since these servers are hosted by the DevDiv IT guys, we went with their recommendation for storage. They already have a massive storage infrastructure for build & drop servers built on Xiotech technology, so it was easy for them to add additional ISE units to meet our size & performance requirements. In the end we ended up with the following configuration:

5TB of “Balanced” storage
5TB of “Performance” storage

The SQL Customer Advisory Team’s – Storage Top 10 Best Practices is a great resource when planning your own TFS deployment. In particular we specifically considered the following:

Isolate log from data at the physical disk level (e.g. O$ drive is on separate spindles)
Consider configuration of TEMPDB database (e.g. T$ drive is on separate spindles)
Make sure to give thought to the growth strategy up front (e.g. We can add additional ISE units at any time and grow any drive without having to migrate data)
Lining up the number of data files with CPU’s has scalability advantages for allocation intensive workloads. (e.g. we have 12 datafiles for TempDB because we have 12 CPU cores)

Here’s how the virtual disks (LUNs) are configured on the server:

SERVER1 (SQL, SSRS, SSAS)

Drive	Purpose	Storage Type	Size (Gb)
E$	SQL backup dump drive	Balanced	2741
G$	LocalVersion filegroup	Performance	1673
I$	OLAP data	Balanced	25
J$	All database data	Performance	1833
K$	Version filegroup	Performance	971
O$	Transaction Logs	Balanced	1500
T$	TempDB	Performance	500

SERVER2 (Hyper-V Host)

Drive	Purpose	Type	Size (Gb)
E$	Hyper-V VM's	Balanced	743

What’s cool about the Xiotech stuff is that it’s like Lego blocks – as you need more storage or more performance, you just buy more blocks and plug them in. What’s even cooler about it, is that you can control the SAN using web services – the build lab uses the SANMan tool they built to move virtual disks between build servers and automate the provisioning of disk space.

Topology

At just over 400 users, we probably don’t need three AT machines in a NLB configuration. However, NLB is an important new feature of TFS2010 and it’s a scenario that we need to dogfood for ourselves.

Here’s some quick facts about our topology:

We have a couple of “friendly name” DNS records for the NLB cluster IP, Reporting Services & Analysis Services – this allows us to change the underlying infrastructure without users having to connect to a new addresses.
We’re running Windows 2008 R2 RTM on our VM’s & soon on our physical servers
A single VM was created, then sysprep’d and copied. This means that we can spin up a new VM in a very short time period. (Copy VHD, Add to Hyper-V, Start, Join Domain, Apply Updates, Done.)
SERVER2 is running an SMTP server that relays mail on behalf of each of the other servers. At Microsoft, the corporate mail servers will only accept mail from authenticated users that have mailboxes. By running the SMTP server as an authenticated user, it allows us to run the application tiers as Network Service. This means when we have to change a password to a service account, it doesn’t cause a TFS service interruption – just a brief SMTP interruption.
Since all the SQL services are running on the same box, they don’t need to be run as a domain accounts either – no service interruption & less places that need a password changed when it expires.

That’s it for hardware and topology, next post is on performance and Dogfood statistics.

TFS Performance Report Pack now works with SSRS2005

grantholliday — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 06:40:14 GMT

Back in February, I released some of the reports that were created for our internal TFS servers on my blog as the TFS Performance Report Pack. I got countless emails and comments on the fact that some of them didn’t work with SQL Reporting Services 2005.

Fortunately, Jim Saunders from the Developer Support team at Microsoft (who have a great blog!) has re-created the three reports in the pack that required SQL2008 Reporting Services. Just download a different version of the reports from here and replace the ones in the original zip file.

From the support team blog:

...He lists SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services as a requirement, with a note that they should work in SSRS 2005. It turns out some of the reports function under both SSRS 2008 and 2005, some do not. Several posters have mentioned incompatibilities with some reports and SSRS 2005.

These reports are compatible with either SSRS version:

Server Status - Historical Performance Trends.rdl

Server Status - Recent Performance Trends.rdl

Server Status - Top Users Bypassing Proxies.rdl

These reports require SSRS 2008:

Execution Time Summary.rdl

Execution Time for User.rdl

Server Status - Source Control Request Queue.rdl

I have created versions of the three reports above that are functionally similar to Grant's reports, but also work with SSRS 2005. You can download my updated reports here. To use my reports, install Grant's TFS Performance Report Pack, and replace the three reports with the versions in the zip file I provided.

Visual Studio Team System 2010 Team Foundation Server Beta 1 Installation Problems

grantholliday — Wed, 20 May 2009 19:38:00 GMT

First of all, see my last post Visual Studio Team System 2010 Beta 1 Download Links for all the download links and installation docs. Also check out Brian Keller’s post on Using a download manager to quickly download Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1.

We greatly value your feedback. Please fill in the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Beta 1 Survey and visit the Microsoft Connect Beta 1 Feedback page to submit a bug or a suggestion.

Also, the Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 Beta1 Forums are being tracked by the product team so that you can get help with your installation issues and share feedback.

If you don’t like forums, or you’d like to discuss TFS2010 with other people over email, you can also join the OzTFS.com mailing list for the latest buss.

The Readme File

In this post, I want to bring your attention to the Team Foundation Server Beta 1 Readme and the common gotchas I’ve seen people hit when installing TFS2010 Beta1.

These are the issues I’ve hit myself (because I didn’t read the readme…)

TF31001 "The ServicePointManager does not support proxies with the https scheme."

If you are trying to connect to a TFS server that is configured using HTTPS, then you might run into this issue.

See Aaron Block’s blog post for all the details.

On all machines:

reg add hklm\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\TeamFoundation\RequestSettings /v BypassProxyOnLocal /t REG_SZ /d False

reg add hklm\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\TeamFoundationServer\10.0\RequestSettings /v BypassProxyOnLocal /t REG_SZ /d False

Additionally on a 64-bit machine:

reg add hklm\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\TeamFoundationServer\10.0\RequestSettings /v BypassProxyOnLocal /t REG_SZ /d False

reg add hklm\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\TeamFoundation\RequestSettings /v BypassProxyOnLocal /t REG_SZ /d False

Initial Configuration of Team Foundation Server Should be Run From MSI Program or by Command Line

Initial Team Foundation Server configuration fails on Windows SharePoint configuration if you access the Team Foundation Configuration Tool by clicking the link in the Team Foundation Administration Console instead of by launching Team Foundation Configuration Tool at the end of the installation phase.

To resolve this issue:

If you want to setup Windows SharePoint Server during Team Foundation Server configuration, you must launch the Team Foundation Server Configuration Tool by using one of the two following methods:

Launch the Team Foundation Configuration Tool by selecting the check box at the end of the Team Foundation Server installation

If you exited Team Foundation Server MSI program (setup.exe) without launching Team Foundation Configuration Tool, do not start the Administration Console from the Start menu item shortcut. Instead use following command line:

%programfiles%\Microsoft team foundation server 10.0\tools\tfsmgmt.exe configure

After Team Foundation Server has installed and configured Windows SharePoint, you can configure Team Foundation Server by using the Start menu to launch Team Foundation Server Administration Console.

If you don’t do this, then your SharePoint configuration will be broken and you’ll get a 404 on the SharePoint Administration site.

Team Foundation Server Name May Not Be Over 14 Characters

The name of the server running Team Foundation Server may not be over 14 characters.

To resolve this issue:

Use a valid NETBIOS name of 14 Characters or less for Team Foundation Server. Configuration fails if the name of the server running Team Foundation Server uses more than 14 characters.

TF50363: The following display name is not valid

This is due to a known bug in our upgrade scripts where in the Version Control db (TfsVersionControl) tbl_Identity table there exists one or more rows where the DisplayName field contains data that is not in the expected format of domain\username.

If you hit this error, the workaround is to update the row and prefix the existing value with a dummy domain name like 'domain\'.

See Bryan Krieger’s blog post TFS 2010 Beta1 - Upgrade may fail with TF50363: The following display name is not valid.

Windows Server 2008 R2 RC & SQL Express

Although Windows Server 2008 R2 RC is not officially supported by this build, it is possible to get TFS running using a couple of workarounds. See Installing TFS 2010 on Windows Server 2008 R2 RC from the TFS Developer Support team.

I’ve also heard talking that that install will work OK with an odd error message, but SQL Express won’t run. Not sure on the details of this one. YMMV. It might need SQL Server 2008 SP1.

Visual Studio 2008 Compatibility with a Team Foundation Server 2010 server

We are planning a Forward Compat GDR for the VSTS 2008 SP1 client. This set of features will allow the VSTS 2008 client users to have a good experience when connected to a TFS 2010 team project, but will not provide full 2010 functionality.

Things that you should know:

Most admin functionality can only be performed from a new client.
- For example, we block PCW from the 2008 client to the 2010 server.
- We require the admin to have a 2010 client.
In Work Item Tracking, we added hierarchy and other link types which the older client does not support. The user experience is being improved with the GDR so the 2008 client user can distinguish which queries are supported and which do you need the 2010 client for.
Work Item Tracking, also has a new location for Reports with the addition of the Team Project Collection structure. The GDR will allow the 2008 client to navigate to the new report location.
Shared Documents, Process Guidance and the Project Portal locations can be configured so again we need the GDR to assist with the new navigation.
Test Case Management is also being enabled in the 2008 client using the GDR.
Version Control is improving the rename scenarios in the GDR.
There are a bunch of error messages which will be more helpful as well.

Readme Topics

I know that people don’t read the Readme files (I’m guilty too) – so here are the headings from the Readme in the hope that you’ll at least browse these for potential issues first :)

Installing
- Upgrade Breaks Links on the SharePoint Products and Technology Portal
- Some Visual Studio Team System 2010 Features Not Available After Upgrade
- Initial Configuration of Team Foundation Server Should be Run From MSI Program or by Command Line
Uninstalling
- Need to uninstall TFS Object Model before uninstalling VSTS if installed from the web
Product Issues
- Managing Users on Upgraded Team Projects Might Result in Error TF50620
- Cannot Install Team Foundation Build Service on Windows XP
- Require SSL Option Not Supported
- No Work Item Only View feature in Team System Web Access
- You Can Only Associate a Single URL with a Team Project in Team Explorer
- Team Foundation Server Service Account must be different then the account used for installing Team Foundation Server
- Uninstall Team Explorer Does Not Remove Visual Studio Shell
- Installing Team Foundation Server on a Windows Domain Requires a Live Connection to the Domain Controller
- Team Foundation Server Name May Not Be Over 14 Characters
- Do Not Launch Teamfoundation.msc Directly or Add to Microsoft Management Console (MMC)
- Changes to Lab Management Network Location Tab Requires an IIS Reset
Converters
- VSSConverter.exe Not Supported
Office Integration
- Office Integration Requires Manual Installation of Office Primary Interop Assemblies (PIA) on Windows XP
- Visual Studio Team System 2010 Installation Program Appears After You Launch Microsoft Project
Process Templates and Team Project Portal
- No Process Guidance Updates
- Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) 5.0 Process Template Incomplete
- Remote Portal Running as Network Service Can Cause Broken Dashboards
Reporting
- Team Foundation Server Stops Collecting Reporting Data from the Team Project Collection
- Team Foundation Server Reports Are Out-of-date After Install/Upgrade
- Team Foundation Server Data Warehouse Custom Adapters Do Not Work
Test Integration
- No Test Steps, Repro Steps or Associated Automation Controls in Team System Web Access
Compatibiltiy
- Team Explorer 2008 or older client users can create new build definitions but they will not be able to edit them or to edit other, existing build definitions.
- Team Explorer 2008 or older clients will be able to submit changes that affect gated build definitions, but they will not be prompted with the confirmation dialog and, if their check-in affects multiple gated definitions, it will fail.
- Team Explorer 2008 or older clients will not be able to manage build resources using the “Manage Build Agents” dialog box.
- Microsoft Project plan documents created using a Team Explorer 2010 client, break when opened from a Team Explorer 2008 or older client.
- Navigation to non-default Shared Document, Project Portal and Process Guidance locations is broken for a Team Explorer 2008 SP1 or older clients.
- Navigation to new Reports is not supported for a Team Explorer 2008 SP1 or older clients.
- Work Item Tracking Queries with new functionality are not supported for a Team Explorer 2008 SP1 or older clients.
- Rename in Version Control is not supported for Team Explorer 2008 SP1 or older clients.
- Test Results Publishing is not supported for a Team Explorer 2008 SP1 or older clients.
- How to connect to Team Explorer 2010 to Team Foundation Server 2008
- How to connect a Team Explorer 2008 SP1 to a Team Foundation Server 2010 Server
- Team Foundation Server 2010 administrative functions are only supported using Team Explorer 2010.

Announcing TFS Performance Report Pack

grantholliday — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 03:00:00 GMT

Update 6/23/2009: Due to popular demand, Jim from the Developer Support team at Microsoft has re-created the three reports that required SQL2008 Reporting Services. See the support team blog for more details.

I’m on the team that runs the busiest Team Foundation Server at Microsoft. The Developer Division instance has over 3,500 active users and processes over 10,000,000 source control and work item tracking requests per day (not including the requests that our 5 proxy servers handle).

We have a responsibility to ensure that the server is performing as expected and to identify any efficiencies that can be made in the server or the tools. To do this, we have created a number of reports that we use ourselves and make available to our own users.

Download

We’re now making these reports available to you to install on your own server and monitor your TFS server’s performance. The plan is to eventually roll these into a power tool release or a subsequent release of VSTS but I’ll let you know more about that when it happens.

Download from here TFS Performance Report Pack.zip (~250Kb)
Download the SQL Server 2005 compatible reports from here SRS2005CompatibleReports.zip (~13Kb)

Requirements

SQL Server Reporting Services
A user with read-only access to the TfsActivityLogging database
A shared datasource to connect the report to (see below)
Command Logging enabled - This logging is enabled by default in TFS 2008.

In TFS 2005 you will have to enable the commandLogging flag in the Global Web.Config file (and the query for the report will be a little different).

Installing

The report pack consists of a ZIP file with a number of Report Definition (*.rdl) files. These files are designed to be deployed onto your existing TFS reporting server, e.g. http://your-tfsserver/Reports/

As a TFS administrator, extract the files to your PC
Open http://your-tfsserver/Reports/
Create a new folder in Reporting Services called “Server Status”
Create a new shared data source called “TfsActivityReportDS” and set the connection string to:
1. Data Source=localhost;Initial Catalog=TfsActivityLogging
2. Credentials: domain\user that has access to the TfsActivityLogging database
3. Use as windows credentials when connecting to the data source

Here’s an overview of what the reports look like and what questions you can answer with them.

Execution Time Summary

This report visualizes the load, in this case reflected by total execution time, on the server from two axis: users and commands.

Use this report when you want to know:

Which commands account for the largest load on the server?
Which tools / or users are putting the biggest load on the server?

Server Status - Source Control Request Queue

Source Control is undoubtedly the application that consumes the most resources on an Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Server. Across the day, a series of requests get queued to be processed as transactions are committed to the database. This report provides a view into that queue.

Use this report when you want to know:

If a request is blocking source control operations and for how long
How healthy is the performance of version control on this hardware?

Lots of red means that you have some long running operations and you may have some problems.

Server Status - Top Users Bypassing Proxies

In the past, I’ve blogged a query to get this information – How many user’s are not using a TFS Proxy server? Internally, we have setup a scheduled subscription that emails this report twice a week.

IT departments strive to provide the best level of service to their users. Hardware requirements planning and setting up proxies are activities that ensure optimal performance for their internal teams when interacting with team Foundation Server. This report allows administrators a view into which users are not complying with internal guidelines and hence decreasing overall server performance.

Server Status - Historical Performance Trends

This report serves as a summary of the average response time for two of the Team Foundation Server subsystems: Work Item Tracking and Version Control

Use this report when you want to know:

How long are users, on average, waiting for a subsystem to process their request
Which days of the week are the most critical when it comes to performance

Server Status - Recent Performance Trends

This report provides more data granularity about the performance of the server. We start with a view into the server average response time, now looking at the entire picture instead of broken down by subsystem. We then follow with charts relating information about version control downloads and average response time distributions for the same time period.

Use this report when you want to know:

The correlation between degraded server performance and average response times by the subsystems
How does a large number of downloads affect overall server performance
Overall health indicator of the server

I hope that you find these reports useful. Please send any questions or feedback as comments to this post, or contact me via email.

TFS Adoption at Microsoft – November 2008

grantholliday — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 04:38:41 GMT

Every month our internal teams put together statistics on the TFS servers deployed at Microsoft. Previous statistics can be found here:

One of the noteworthy milestones this month is total Work Items stored has now surpassed the 3,000,000 mark. We’re also approaching 50 million Source Files stored.

Here’s the summary of growth indicators for the month:

November 2008	Growth	Totals
Unique Active Users	+170	15,308
Total Active Users	+377	17,388
Projects	+125	2,749
Work Items	+167,598	3,050,512
Source Code Files	+2,441,418	47,418,877
Total Builds	+60,121	584,380

The Service Offering consists of 27 instances, 24 running on TFS 2008 SP1 and 3 running very early Rosario bits.

The total number of active unique users has grown 9% since July. Also, as a reminder, In July 2008, the number of active users was adjusted to report on unique users only, eliminating duplicates across instances:

Visual Studio 2010 CTP VPC will expire Jan 1 2009

grantholliday — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 12:42:32 GMT

If you are running the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 CTP under Virtual PC or Hyper-V, you should know that the copy of Visual Studio installed in the VPC is set to expire.

After January 1, 2009, you will no longer be able to launch the Visual Studio in the VS2010 CTP. This is due to a hard-coded expiration date in this CTP. CTP's are pre-release software, so they aren't designed to run forever.

If you haven’t disabled time synchronization before Jan 1 and you start Visual Studio – you will need to re-download the image and disable time synchronization before starting fresh.

Workaround for Virtual PC Users

See Brian Keller’s post on Dealing with Activation Messages for the full details. But essentially it boils down disabling time synchronization under Virtual PC 2007 before the timebomb is hit.

Workaround for Hyper-V Users

If you converted the VPC to run under Windows 2008 Hyper-V using my previous instructions, disabling time synchronization is different. See Cameron Skinner’s post on disabling time synchronization in Hyper-V for the full details. You need to take a snapshot of the VM, shut it down and go into Settings >> Integration Services >> Time Synchronization and disabled it.

Hosted Team Foundation Server

grantholliday — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 05:56:47 GMT

Since the Readify TFSNow! hosted TFS offering that I helped to build is no longer in operation, people have asked if there is anybody else doing it.

There are three partners that I know of that offer to run and maintain Team Foundation Server in the cloud for you:

Phase2
TeamDevCentral
Saas Made Easy
CodePlex – your project must be open source

I don’t have any experience with any of them, so please let me know what you think.

Remotely connecting to a Hyper-V virtual machine with networking disabled

grantholliday — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 21:59:13 GMT

In a previous blog post, I explained the steps to convert the VS2010 CTP VPC from Virtual PC to Hyper-V. When using virtual machines, sometimes you don’t want them to be connected to any network. This is especially true with the Team Foundation Server 2010 CTP VPC – if you connect it to the network, it probably will stop functioning.

This post explains how you can use the Hyper-V Virtual Machine Connection tool to connect to a VM running on a remote Hyper-V server. The way this works is that it connects to the Hyper-V instance, then directly to the virtual machine’s console on that instance. It doesn’t require the virtual machine to have networking support enabled.

If your workstation is running Windows Server 2008, then you just need to install the Hyper-V tools and use them. If you are running Windows Vista on your remote workstation, you will need to install one of these packages:

You may also need to enable remote WMI between your computers.

Once you have the VMConnect.exe tool installed at "C:\Program Files\Hyper-V\vmconnect.exe", you can create a shortcut to connect directly to the virtual machine. The syntax is this:

So for example, to connect to the VM by the name of “VS2010CTP” running on the remote machine “MyHyperVServer”, create a shortcut like this:

"C:\Program Files\Hyper-V\vmconnect.exe" MyHyperVServer VS2010CTP

Downloading all PDC2008 session videos

grantholliday — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 01:40:00 GMT

If you missed out on PDC this year, you probably know that all the sessions were recorded and made available on MSDN’s Channel9. It’s not immediately obvious from the Channel9 site, but it is possible to get an RSS feed of all the videos that are available.

This makes it very easy to download all the videos and convert them to your Zune for commute viewing.

The RSS feed is: http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/pdc2008/RSS/Default.aspx

If you want to download all the VSTS2010 sessions that our team presented, these are the direct URLs to the videos:

If you want to download all 130 videos (37Gb), then download the attached PDC2008_Videos.txt file and import it into your favourite download tool. I like Free Download Manager.

Query Work Items changed in recent hours

grantholliday — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 23:45:19 GMT

Yesterday I got another question on one of our internal mailing list and I remembered it as one that I’ve answered before on OzTFS.com. The answer comes from this MSDN forum post.

By default, the TFS Work Item Query engine operates in “date precision” mode. This means that you can only run queries like:

Show me all the work items changed in the last week
Show me all the work items changed in the last day

If you want to query on work items changed within a narrower timeframe, you’ll need to call the object model directly and turn off “date precision” mode. For example:

Show me all the work items that have changed since 5AM today.

using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client;
using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Client;

namespace WorkItemQueryByHour
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            TeamFoundationServer tfs = TeamFoundationServerFactory.GetServer("http://your-tfsserver:8080", new UICredentialsProvider());
            WorkItemStore wis = (WorkItemStore)tfs.GetService(typeof(WorkItemStore));

            Query query = new Query(wis, "SELECT [System.Id], [System.Title], [System.ChangedDate] FROM WorkItems WHERE [System.ChangedDate] > '2008-10-01 05:00:00'", null, false);

            ICancelableAsyncResult car = query.BeginQuery();
            WorkItemCollection items = query.EndQuery(car);

        }
    }
}

Microsoft Unveils Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0

grantholliday — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 19:14:40 GMT

The press release just went live over on MS press pass. Go and have a look at the enticing screenshots and read the Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) 2010 overview on MSDN. This is the release formally code-named “Rosario”.

And best of all, Brian Keller is running Visual Studio Team System 2010 Week on Channel9. With new videos every day this week, they are not to be missed! Here’s the RSS feed.

Monday, September 29th:
- Announcing Visual Studio Team System 2010

Architecture Day (Tuesday, September 30th):
- Overview from Cameron Skinner
- UML designers
- "Top-down design"
- "Bottom-up design"

Business Alignment (Wednesday, October 1st):
- Overview from Lori Lamkin and Stephanie Saad
- Agile project planning and reporting
- Enterprise project management

Software Quality (Thursday, October 2nd):
- Overview from James Whittaker
- Test Case Management
- Manual Test Runner
- Historical Debugger
- Impact Analysis

Team Foundation Server (Friday, October 3rd):
- Overview from Brian Harry
- Branching and merging visualization
- Enterprise Team Foundation Server Management
- Team Foundation Server Setup
- Migration & Synchronization
- Team Build

We’re really looking forward to hearing what the world thinks about the next version of VSTS.

TFS Adoption at Microsoft

grantholliday — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 01:03:00 GMT

It’s been 12 months since Brian blogged about Team Foundation Server adoption across all of Microsoft (not just Developer Division Dogfood Statistics). Since I’m now on the team responsible for internal adoption I’ll share some of the numbers that we publish every month.

The growth of unique active users across all TFS servers in August was 582, totaling 14,684 at Microsoft.
We’ve also surpassed 40 million source code files stored.

Now, for the summary of key growth indicators for the month:

July 2008	Growth	Totals
Unique Active Users	+582	14,684
Total Active Users	+824	16,492
Projects	+124	2,370
Work Items	+85,867	2,607,100
Source Code Files	+1,848,683	40,790,715
Total Builds	+20,052	464,879

We now have 27 TFS instances in production. 20 are running TFS 2008 RTM, 4 are running TFS 2008 SP1 Beta, 3 are running a preliminary Rosario build. We’re in the process of upgrading the 2008 RTM + SP1 Beta instances to SQL 2008 RTM and TFS 2008 SP1.

This graph shows the number of active users per division within Microsoft. Each division is at a different stage of TFS adoption (Source control, Bug tracking, Feature tracking, Task tracking, Team Build, or any combination of each) which is why the numbers don’t correlate well with the size of the teams.

You may notice a ‘dip’ in the June/July numbers - Historically, we’ve reported a rollup of unique users per instance which is a true representation of instance activity but not unique users of TFS across the entire company. For example, since MSIT has multiple instances of TFS, a single user may be working on projects on 2 or more separate instances. The data now reflects unique users per division instead of per instance.

The number of team projects across all instances continues to grow at a steady rate of ~200 projects a month.

I hope you find this useful and if you have any other questions or numbers that you’d like to see, let me know and I’ll see what I can do.

Book Review of Team Foundation Server 2008 in Action

grantholliday — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 16:16:00 GMT

Earlier in the year I was contacted by Manning Publications to participate in the Manning Early Access Program (MEAP). They provided me with an unedited draft of a new book "Team Foundation Server 2008 in Action" (ISBN 1933988592) by Jamil Azher and asked me as a TFS subject matter expert to post a review to my blog and Amazon.

Contents:

Chapter 1: TFS and the practice of software development (free download)
Chapter 2: Exploring the Changes in TFS 2008
Chapter 3: Introducing VSTS 2008 Database Edition
Chapter 4: Understanding branching in Version Control
Chapter 5: Understanding Branch Policies
Chapter 6: Understanding Merging in Version Control
Chapter 7: Understanding Team Build
Chapter 8: Versioning Assemblies using Team Build
Chapter 9: Configuring and Extending TFS
Chapter 10: Using workflow with TFS

After reading through the 10 chapters (~500 pages) of the draft I can recommend the book to these groups of people:

You're using TFS on a day-to-day basis but you want to know "more" without having to spend hours scouring MSDN and learning it yourself.
You've been using TFS 2005 and you're about to (or already have) upgraded to TFS2008. This book has a focus on the changes and new features introduced in TFS2008.
There is a strong focus on Team Foundation Build. One of the biggest investments in TFS2008 was Team Build, so it's understandable that Jamil has 3-4 chapters that are build related.
Extensibility. The book explains all the different extensibility points in TFS and provides original and practical code samples for building your own extensions.

One of the challenges for all technical books is that sometimes the information is out of date by the time your book goes to print. From the screenshots I can see that Jamil started writing when TFS 2008 was in it's "Beta 2" release. Since then, the product and a Service Pack have shipped to address some of the most common issues. There has also been work by the community and product team to improve guidance and documentation.

The real value in the book for me was the practical examples. Even as somebody who has been deeply involved in the TFS community and now the product team there are plenty of examples in the book that I haven't seen before:

Building code from multiple team projects
Patterns for centralized / distributed team build systems
Code submissions system (gated checkin)
Custom controls to show the build status in a work item
Integrating with SharePoint KPI dashboards
Using Windows Workflow with Team Build

With everything considered this is a book worth reading if you want to further leverage your existing investment in Team Foundation Server 2008 and learn more about Team Foundation Build 2008. Great work Manning and Jamil!