A change in our ETM Architecture Plans

As you guys already know we are working on a set of architectural investments that will allow us to scale out the TFS deployment. These scale out capabilities allows administrators to easily manage the load put by their teams on Team Foundation Server while simultaneously reducing the TCO of our offering. Our vision is Manage Complexity, Achieve Agility. We published the details of our plans in a spec located here: Enterprise Team Foundation Server Management

Today I wanted to let you know of a change: Supporting Multiple TFS Instances on one Application Tier (physical machine) has been CUT.

Why you might ask?

Before answering the question, let us look at what Multiple TFS Instances per physical machine (AT node) provides you. In short, it gives you the ability to have multiple TFS Applications or top level websites on one machine given further isolation for the different teams that use the system. For example, I can recycle, make an update, change settings to TeamA without affecting TeamB because they are on different processes. There is also a rolling upgrade scenario that becomes easy once you allow these multiple instances.

Perfect! Now the problem is that you can accomplish this today by using  virtualization. Have this machine split into two machines and now you can install TFS in it and have even a greater control on the settings, memory, etc. Essentially we are enabling an already existing and soon to become very hot/popular technology. Given this, we felt that our time and resources were better spent doing other features and leave those scenarios that were enabled to the virtualization technologies.

Any thoughts or complaints please add a comment or just email me directly.

- mario