As an enterprise product goes RTM, its deployment options gain more focus. The customers who adopt that product need to pay attention to non-functional areas in addition to functional features of that product. Two key non functional areas are:
- High Availability
- Capacity Planning
This is true for Team Foundation Server also. We (HP) have been involved in all these areas with Microsoft right since early Beta stages of VSTS. When VSTS was in development stages, we extended TFS to develop an enterprise project and process management solution, APPRISE. Since TFS went RTM, we’ve been working on other two areas: Capacity Planning and High Availability.
For capacity planning, HP had released deployment configuration paper with HP Servers that i had written about in one of my earlier blog. This paper had given deployment configurations of different capacities in terms of numbers of users: 10-50, 10-500, 100-500, 500-3500.
For high availability, TFS Data Tier (DT) supported HA using SQL Server Clustering, however, AT HA configuration (using NLB) required manual intervention. Read Brian’s blog for more details on that. HP provided a sophisticated and automated solution for AT HA using HP Insight Manager. HP has released a white paper on this configuration also. This is a 53 pages paper that provides each and every step in detail:
- Configuring NLBs
- Installing and configuring TFS AT
- Installing and configuring HP SIM
- Configuring the RDP Job
- Configuring HP SIM and creating Tasks
Rob Caron has also blogged on these papers here. You can find HP’s VSTS related paper here.
And while testing TFS on HA setup was going on, we also tested our solution, APPRISE on the same setup and made it compliant to both the setups: SQL Clustering and AT warm stand-by failover. We demonstrated both TFS and APPRISE HA configurations in Tech Ed 2006.
Sanjay Narang\'s Blog 