Migrate TFS2010 to TFS2013 on new hardware keeping existing TFS2010 installation in place

Question

We need to move our current TFS2010 installation to a new TFS2013 box but would like to have a testing period in which both instances are live before eventually sunsetting the TFS2010 instance. The TFS2013 instance would be used for testing only for the first few weeks.

Just prior to sunsetting we would again migrate the TFS 2010 data again to the TFS2013 instance to get the most recent changes.

The TFS2010 cannot be upgraded in place to TFS 2013 as its on 32 bit OS and my preference would be to remain conservative and keep the current production TFS2010 instance untouched during the testing period.

I used the TFS power tools to back up the TFS2010 deployment to a share. [Excluding the reporting databases]

I installed TFS2013 on the new box but the TFSRestore Tool and the TFS Power Toold do not list the TFS 2010 backups when I navigate to the backup location folder.

My plan was to follow the procedure below especially wrt the steps around cloning. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms404869.aspx

I'm not too bothered about SSRS or Sharepoint migration. In SSRS we use only the default reports and have not customized much (if anything) - we would manually set up anything we need to in the new SSRS setup.

SharePoint is not used to the extent that it should be so we don't mind starting from scratch.

Just wondering what my options are.

1. Uninstall TFS2013 on the new box, install TFS 2010 instead on the new box, restore [TFSRestore] from the production TFS2010 backups and then do an upgrade to TFS2013 on the new box.
2. Manually restore the TFS 2010 collection databases to the new box in SQL Server and in TFS 2013 Attach a collection - assuming it will upgrade.

Would appreciate some guidance especially from those of you that have done this before.

Thanks in advance,

Liam

Answer 1

I have done two migration upgrades. One from 2008 -> 2010 and once again from 2010 to 2012. Both times I used sql server backup and restore. I have been on TFS since version 2005 and have tried both in-place and migration upgrades all the way up to the latest 2013.2 (and 2013.3 is planned really soon). Migration upgrades are "easy" to test, since you can always spin up a new test vm and try it out.

Answer 2

I would suggest using option 2. You don't really need to have TFS 2010 on the new box. These are the steps you can follow (and this is what I've done myself):

• Restore TFS backups on the new machine (using SQL server)
• Install TFS 2013. Important: do not configure it at this point, you don't need to create new TFS Configuration database, you'll use the one you restored from the old server.
• Run tfsconfig changeserverid command (on the new server) to change the TFS server id. It's required because you want to have both TFS instances live for some time. If you don't do it, VS clients will think that it's the same server (even though the name is different) and this can cause some issues.
• Run tfsconfig remapdbs command (on the new server) which will fix the old Tfs_Configuration database. This is only required because you are moving TFS to a different machine (with a different name)
• Now you can start TFS management console and perform the actual upgrade