Upgrade your deployment to the latest version of TFS
Important: Direct upgrade to TFS 2015 is supported only from TFS 2010 SP1 and newer. If your TFS deployment is on an older version than that, you will need to upgrade to TFS 2015 in multiple hops. For example, if you are on TFS 2008 you could upgrade to TFS 2012 first and then to TFS 2015.
The general process for upgrading an existing deployment of Team Foundation Server is to:
Prepare your environment. New system requirements may require you to upgrade hardware or software. And regardless, an upgrade is a good time to consider whether your current environment is meeting your needs, or whether it makes sense to make changes.
Expect the best, prepare for the worst. While we put a lot of effort into ensuring that TFS upgrades are highly reliable, it always makes sense to prepare for the case where something goes wrong. The single most important step you can take here is to ensure you have a complete and consistent set of database backups. You should also consider doing a dry run of your upgrade in a pre-production environment.
Do the upgrade! Once the preparation is done, you'll need to install the new version of TFS to get new binaries, and then run through the upgrade wizard to upgrade your databases.
Complexity
Upgrading a TFS deployment can be quite straightforward or quite complicated, depending on the specifics of your existing deployment. Factors that will influence the complexity and duration of your upgrade include:
- How many servers are involved in your deployment.
- Whether your deployment is configured with SharePoint integration or reporting.
- How large your databases are.
- How old a version you are upgrading from.
In all cases, however, the general process is logically the same. Get your environment ready; Expect the best, prepare for the worst; and finally, Do the upgrade.
Downtime
Your TFS deployment will be offline for the duration of the upgrade. Upgrade times can be measured in minutes for very small deployments or in days for very large deployments. You can keep your upgrades comparably speedy by cleaning up unnecessary data. If you're keeping up with the latest versions of TFS, that helps a lot, too.
If you're upgrading a very large database to TFS 2015, consider using the TfsPreUpgrade tool. It performs the most expensive parts of the upgrade from TFS 2013 QU4/QU5 in the background, allowing you to continue using TFS. This tool can cut offline times for upgrade significantly for large databases - one internal Microsoft database went from over a week of offline time down to under a day.
Details
Walk through a TFS Express upgrade - this is as simple as it gets.
Walk through a standard upgrade scenario - upgrading a two server deployment from TFS 2012 to TFS 2015.
We will be covering more advanced scenarios - things like upgrading deployments which have multiple application tiers in a load balancer, deployments which have their databases in SQL Always On availability groups, etc. - in future updates. In the meantime, the documentation for TFS 2013 and earlier is still relevant and can provide some guidance for these more advanced scenarios.
