Planning for Team Foundation Server
The Team Foundation Server planning guide provides planning guidance for the operational and administrative requirements for Team Foundation Server. It addresses hardware requirements, software requirements, deployment topologies, process guidance, and integration with other software. It does not provide deployment guidance or how-to steps, but is intended to help business decision-makers and network administrators plan for Team Foundation Server.
Purpose of this Planning Guide
This guide is intended to help you plan for adding Team Foundation Server to your business, whether you are already using Visual Studio Team System or not. After reading this guide, you should be able to create:
A hardware plan (including dates to order equipment if necessary).
A backup and restore plan.
A software integration plan.
A task list for the administrator who will maintain the systems in your organization and create initial projects.
Terminology
The following terms are used throughout this planning guide:
Visual Studio Team System
A software life cycle product family that provides an end-to-end solution for software development teams that build service-oriented applications using the .NET Framework.
Team Foundation Server
The product name given to the set of source control, work item tracking, build, team project portal, reporting, and project management features for Windows Server 2003.
Team Foundation application-tier server
The logical designation of a subset of Team Foundation Server features that consists primarily of ASP.NET Web services running under Internet Information Services (IIS), but also includes the TFS Scheduler service and the Build Services service, which are Windows services. The physical grouping of these Team Foundation Server features on a single computer is referred to as Team Foundation Server (services).
Team Foundation data-tier server
The logical designation of a subset of Team Foundation Server features that consists of all persistent data in Team Foundation, including all SQL databases and the files and directories used to store work item attachments. The physical grouping of these Team Foundation Server features on a single computer is referred to as Team Foundation Server (databases).
Role-based client
One of the Visual Studio Team System client applications specifically targeted to a role in the software development life cycle. There are three role-based clients in Visual Studio Team System: Visual Studio Team Edition for Architects, Visual Studio Team Edition for Developers, and Visual Studio Team Edition for Testers.
Team Explorer
A Visual Studio-based client application for software project management and analysis. Team Explorer is not considered a role-based client like Visual Studio Team Edition for Developers.