Apr
20
2009
Brian Harry posted a blog entry today explaining some new concepts in TFS 2010. In his blog entry he talks about the introduction of Team Project Collections. Brian explains that the introduction for a new hierarchy level between the existing Server “node” and the Team Projects was necessary because some scenarios like backup and restore of an individual project or consolidating TFS Servers were difficult or impossible to do due to subtle dependencies in the meta data which make up the TFS DB.
Team Project Collections
As I said, the Team Project Collections is a new level introduced between the TFS Server and Team Project selection. Brian states that if you familiar with the Sharepoint Site Collections and understand the Sharepoint architecture you will find that the Team Project Collections are based on the same concepts and that the benefits and limitations are quite similar. I just wonder if it wouldn’t be better to link a TFS structure to the architecture of your domain, so instead of selecting a server, the domain you authenticate against is the TFS Farm you work with, you wouldn’t have to select a server to work with however you could also introduce Organizational Units which would host a TFS Farm… anyways…I am sure MS have thought of something similar.
The introduction of Team Project Collections brought a change in the organization of the TFS databases. Basically you will find a TFS_Configuration (after Beta 1), TFS_Warehouse and TFS_{Team Project Collection}. The TFS_Configuration is considered the “root” and hosts the configuration data for TFS and also contains a list of the Team Project Collections. For each Team Project Collection there is one TFS_{Team Project Collection} database which contains all of the operational data and as such allows for the scenarios as described before.
I can see that this would allow for a performance gain if you, as TFS Admin, really monitor the load of your Team Projects and the need for a best practice guide for Team Project Collections cannot be far away.
The introduction of TFS Farms brings two big changes; one is the NLB support for the application tier which is awesome!! Now you can do your patching without users to be affected, or a server can fail without impacting your daily production work, I think this is a big win for large development teams or enterprise like organizations.
The other thing is Scale out possibilities for SQL data tiers. This means that you now have the opportunity to place each Team Project Collection database on its own SQL Server. This change would allow for better DB management, load balancing, moving of databases and so on.
All in all some great features added which will be explained more in depth in the near future by Brain and his team.
Beta 1
Brian states in his blog entry that Beta 1 is not far away but no date has been mentioned :-) we can only hope!
You can find Brian’s full blog entry here.