TFS 2012 - Publish or Deploy build on multiple machines?

Question

We have Continuous Integration setup through TFS 2012. Requirement: Wanted the release build to be deployed on mulitple servers as a part of the CI. We need to do a xCopy of the files onto the server folders.

On TFS with Azure there seems to be a facility to publish it directly onto the server (http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/net/common-tasks/publishing-with-tfs/) There-in it uses 'AzureContinuousDeployment.11.xaml' as the Build Process Template. Wanted to check if anybody has tried similar publishing for custom/local servers, maybe using Custom deployment template, etc.

Answer 1

You likely want to create Standard Environments for Automated Deployment and Testing which you can do out of the box with TFS 2010. TFS 2012 and TFS 2013.

You use the "Lab Centre" which is part of the Microsoft Test Manager product to configure Environments that consist of one or more target machines.

You then use the Lab Default Template to push a build output to the target servers and execute a script to complete the install. You can even have your Integration and UI tests executed as part of the same actions.

If you are looking for more integrated Release Management with Team Foundation Server then you should look to Octopus Deploy as a good way to go all the way to production.

We use it with many of our customers and it works a treat...

Answer 2

From my understanding TFS 2012 ships with a Lab Deployment template. You configure the lab definitions of which servers are involved and then configure the deployments to those servers. Also used for hooking Test Manager in to run unit tests in the lab.