TFS 2010 to 2013: SQL Server from 2008 R2 Standard to 2014 Express

3
votes

Our current TFS 2010 environment is 64 bit Windows 2008 (not R2) and SQL Server 2008 Standard Edition. We are looking to migrate to TFS 2013 on 64 bit Windows 2008 R2 with SQL Server 2014 Express. In our current environment we use the built in sharepoint and reporting services. We are going from Standard to Express due to the licensing cost of 2014.

I am hoping to do an in place upgrade on the same server. We will upgrade Windows to 2008 R2 before hand and then run through the TFS 2013 Upgrade Tool. What concerns me is the migration from SQL Standard to SQL Express.

So my questions are:

  1. Does anyone have any experience with a SQL version change like this as it relates to TFS? Will the upgrade tool take care of the migration of the databases for us or will we have to install a separate instance of SQL Express and then manually backup and restore the databases to the new instance?

  2. Will we be losing any functionality of TFS by going from SQL Server Standard to Express?

1
sql-serversql-server-2008-r2upgrade
You are going to be limited by database size. Each database in Express can be a maximum of 10 GB. – Cᴏʀʏ

1 Answers

2
votes

You'll run into a number of limitations that are inherent to SQL Server Express. These are laid out here. Depending on your setup you might run into one or more issues:

  • Performance degradation due to the limitations built into SQL Express. This could severely limit your team's productivity.

  • Maximum database size (which will limit the set of Test recorders you might be able to use, plus you would not want to turn on TFS 2013u4's feature that stores the build artifacts in the database.

  • Certain failover features are not available in SQL Express

I do wonder why you would not want to just use the SQL Server 2014 Standard license that comes with TFS. It would be free of charge.

From the license Whitepaper:

General Guidance for Licensing Team Foundation Server

  • One instance of the Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Standard software can be used as the Team Foundation Server 2013 database, except for Team Foundation Server 2013 Express which uses SQL Server 2014 Express. Team Foundation Server 2013 uses Microsoft SQL Server as its data repository and provides the right to deploy one instance of SQL Server 2014 Standard software per Team Foundation Server 2013 server license. This is not a separate SQL Server license. This instance of SQL Server can run on a separate server but can only be used by Team Foundation Server—not for any other purposes. If you do use the SQL Server software for purposes other than Team Foundation Server, then you must license that use separately.

Source: Visual Studio and TFS 2013 license whitepaper

As for the upgrade process, you need to manually upgrade SQL Server and move the databases over using the provided guidance.