My current work setup is:

• VM server #1 (single CPU VM, Win Server 2008R2, 6gb RAM) – TFS server, Sharepoint Services, SQL 2008 Standard
• VM server #2 (single CPU VM, Win Server 2008R2, 4gb RAM) – Reporting Services and Data Analysis server
• Desktop PC (dual core proc, XP SP3, 2gb RAM) – build controller and two build agents

I’m currently hosting five different project collections on this setup. My department’s “production” collection is the most active with around six TFS “projects” and a little over 500 work items. It’s mostly new development that is going into the TFS stack but I’ve been so busy with emergency work during the day and meetings that I’ve not been able to provide much guidance in regards to migration from the old VCS to TFS.

What have I learned?

• Security can be a nightmare as there are TONS of moving parts between Sharepoint, TFS, SQL, Reporting Services, and Data Analysis. My approach is to leverage domain groups and create matching groups in the various services. Then to add/remove someone you just go through the domain admins rather than adjusting everything in multiple places across the technology stack. But, this is still a lot more work than it should be, in my opinion. I cannot imagine properly administering this in an environment with thousands of users. I hope a power tool is released or some sort of centralized admin tool is created by someone.
• I have a lot more respect for Sharepoint now. I’ve always been involved with Sharepoint from outside the department that administers it. I’ve created a couple web parts at a previous job and fought with overly possessive and territorial admins, which made life a nightmare. Being able to see the inner workings of Sharepoint and figure out the admin side has made me realize there is a lot more to the product than meets the eye. I’d like to take time to preview Sharepoint 2010 in the near future as it seems like they’re really pushing it as a “platform” rather than a content management system.
• Despite the positives I’ve found in Sharepoint, the integration between TFS/Test Manager and Sharepoint just doesn’t feel right in some spots. It seems like there is a lot of missing feedback from things like builds and the testing environment that don’t make it back into the portal by default. I’ll list some examples at some point down the road. I just feel like you have to click through too many work items often to find the results or something.

What’s next?

A custom project template for my department.

• We’re not quite “agile”, but I’m leaning things that way. So, I want to leverage what is in the agile template for 2010, but add or remove a couple items.

Integration with an outside work request/ticket system.

• There are a lot of big companies out there in bed with Computer Associates/CA. We have a Service Desk system in place at the corporate level and groups are being pushed heavy towards that for tickets and requests. However, there is an initiative to migrate source control and other project artifacts to TFS. Obviously, this will be an issue when you’re going through your development/support life-cycle and you have no traceability of work items, since they’d be in Service Desk. In my opinion, without work items in TFS, you really don’t gain much other than a better VCS than SourceSafe. I have some tech info on the web services for the CA product and have started to wire up a link between the two.

Evaluation of the Scrum for Team System template.

• Other groups evaluating my TFS implementation are using a full-blown Scrum methodology.

Some sort of time-tracking tool integrated into TFS that links time to work items.

• This is a controversial one when you look around the blogs.
• Personally, I have such a chaotic schedule during the day and support over 500 users across 50+ “applications” which range from large web applications for payroll to single-page legacy ASPX apps I support. I’d like to say the process for support requests or emergencies is controlled, but the fact is we are understaffed like most groups. By the time 3 or 4pm hits, I often am scratching my head about where the majority of my day went. And when you add a handful of meetings each week, it gets really out of hand. So, I want to make it clear that I want time tracking for myself. Not some big brother, “how long is your ass in the seat”, time-tracking.
• I really like the little time tracking tool that you can download and use with Paymo, a free time-tracking/invoice web app I’ve used for side projects. I’d like to make some simple little toolbar widget that has a list of work items assigned to you in TFS and a timer start/stop. There are some other features I have in mind, but it would allow me to keep a more realistic overview of what I actually did each week. I currently rely on my Outlook calendar (which looks like a bad game of Tetris) and old emails; but those techniques are hardly accurate.

And finally… update to 2010 RTM. Which comes out around 10am PST tomorrow!!!

Memory Considerations

Getting a new virtual server setup at the corporate IT level is pretty nice where I work. I don't think its always been this way, but thanks to improvements in virtualization, I can have a production server in a couple days or less that is ready to host a SQL instance, host my applications in IIS, or whatever else I need. Our corporate standard is something like 30gb of disk storage on a D: or E: drive (not supposed to install other apps on C:), a single core of a processor, and something like 2gb of RAM. When filling out the resource request form, you can specify more resources to be allocated.

For my TFS2010RC deployment (which is for a very small team), I didn't bother asking for additional resources and it was a painful learning curve. Flat out, unless I did something wrong, TFS2010 with all options on a single box (SQL2008, reporting services, Sharepoint, and data warehousing) will not run on 2gb of RAM. This is not rocket science and I fully expect responses to this post to make fun of me for even considering it. But, I didn't consider it at all. Because its so fast and easy (and cheap) to get a new server setup now, I didn't do a lot of research. Common sense would indicate you'd want more RAM for just running a SQL Server install, but I just went with the default and right away when getting my first team portal up and running, the server was hating life and hammering memory utilization at 95% or higher all the time. Due to this, I ended up trying to create a new project collection which became corrupt due to a SQL task not finishing. (more on that later)

Fortunately, I was able to resolve this by sending a request to bump the server up to 4gb of RAM, and within the afternoon I was asked when someone could make the change and a simple reboot had doubled my memory.

All is well now. I run around 60% memory utilization, but there are probably some tweaks I could make to SQL Server to lower that threshold. Obviously you could also split your install up across multiple servers to scale out easier. But for now I am keeping it simple (and cheap) on a single instance.

Anyone else out there running a full TFS2010 install in a virtual server? Have hints, questions, comments? Drop me a line.