You must decide which type of move best suits your business needs. Potential server move scenarios include the following:

• Move a server from domain A to domain B   If you do not change the hardware, this is an environment-based move type. You might do this if you evaluated Team Foundation Server in a test domain and you want to move the server to a production domain. Moving servers might also involve moving or recreating user accounts, group accounts, and permissions from the original server.

• Move a single server from a workgroup to a domain   This is an environment-based move type. You might do this if you deployed Team Foundation Server in a workgroup and then decided to implement an Active Directory domain. You can move local users from a workgroup to a domain if the same user account is in the domain, or if the user account exists as a local account on Team Foundation Server.

• Replace the hardware in a Team Foundation Server deployment   This is a restore-based move type. You might do this if you had to replace the hardware on which you installed Team Foundation Server.

• Expand the capacity of your single-server Team Foundation Server deployment   The move type for this is determined by whether you want to move your deployment to a faster server that has more capacity, or you want to move from a single-server deployment to a dual-server deployment. The former is a restore-based move, where the latter is a single-server to dual-server based move. You might do this if you experienced poor performance on your current Team Foundation Server deployment and needed more capacity for users, projects, and data.

If it is possible, keep the Team Foundation application-tier server name the same   For environment-based moves and single-server to dual-server moves, keep the same name for the Team Foundation application-tier server if it is possible. Changing the Team Foundation application-tier server name adds the following complications:

• Changing the Team Foundation application-tier server name requires that all Team Foundation clients must connect to a new server name.

• All query-bound Microsoft Office documents will no longer work if the server name is changed. The documents are bound to the server for which they were created. This includes all the query bound Microsoft Office documents that are created automatically at project creation time in the project Documents node.

• Any embedded links to documents will point to an unknown server name if the server name is changed.

Note
For restore-based move types, the Team Foundation application-tier server name must be changed.

Moving users and service accounts   As part of the security model, Team Foundation Server stores Windows identities (local and domain groups and users) by their security identifiers (SIDs). The Team Foundation Group Security Service regularly synchronizes the information stored in the TFSIntegration database based on SIDs as the unique identifier for each user. Therefore, depending on your move type, the SIDs in the TFSIntegration database might not be valid after the move. This is true if:

• Local accounts existed on the original Team Foundation Server. You must decide whether these accounts will be recreated as local accounts on the moved Team Foundation Server, or as domain accounts in the moved Team Foundation Server's new domain.

• Domain accounts existed on the original Team Foundation Server, but you are moving Team Foundation Server to a domain that does not trust the original domain. You must decide whether these accounts will be re-created as local accounts on the moved Team Foundation Server, or as domain accounts in the moved Team Foundation Server's new domain.

To maintain the existing set of Team Foundation Server users and groups and their assigned permissions, Team Foundation Server ships a command-line tool (TfsAdminUtil). One of the TFSAdminUtil commands updates each entry in the TFSIntegration database that uses a SID for the user account to an entry present in the new domain if it finds one. For more information, see TFSAdminUtil Command-Line Commands.

Important

In order to successfully move Windows users and groups and their permissions with the TfsAdminUtil SID command, the users and groups must have the same account name in both the original Team Foundation Server environment and in the new domain. The tool does not let you define a mapping between account names for user moving purposes. It is also possible that as part of a move, the service accounts used by the original Team Foundation Server deployment will not be found in the moved Team Foundation Server deployment. To move the service account, you should use the TfsAdminUtil ChangeAccount command.

Prepare with a test run   It is a good idea to test moving to a new environment with a test run exercise to help determine and troubleshoot any unforeseen issues. Your move scenarios and deployment environments might differ from those tested by Microsoft. Performing a test run will help you identify possible differences in the move steps that are particular to your deployment.