TFS 2010 Upgrade Path to Azure DevOps Services - Circumvent or Not Circumvent?

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I am preparing an upgrade of an on-premises TFS 2010 instance to the cloud-based Azure DevOps Services, using Microsoft's Data Migration Tool for Azure DevOps Migration to facilitate the collection database move to Azure DevOps Services. There are however a few key points or caveats to highlight relating to this proposed upgrade and these are listed below.

  1. It will be an "In Place Upgrade", meaning we intend to use the existing "on-premises" hardware throughout the process.
  2. Our TFS 2010 instance is hosted on a Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise server.
  3. The Data Tier is implemented on a Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 instance.

Now, the Data Migration Guide recommends that to migrate to Azure DevOps Services, we first need to complete an upgrade from TFS 2010 to TFS 2013, as per the attached Upgrade path map. TFS 2013 however is not compatible with SQL Server 2008 R2 and requires SQL Server 2012 (Express, Standard, Enterprise).

On the other hand, TFS 2012 supports SQL Server 2008 R2 and can also then be upgraded directly to Azure DevOps Services, according to the Data Migration Tool's Recommended Upgrade Path. This, I believe will avoid the need to upgrade our current instance of SQL Server from SQL 2008 R2 to SQL Server 2012 (to upgrade to TFS 2013), in order to finally achieve our objective of upgrading to Azure DevOps Services.

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Can anyone foresee any issues with this approach, or should we just bite the bullet and complete that SQL 2008 to SQL 2012 upgrade as suggested in the guide?

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2 Answers

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Please check this documentation:

The data migration tool for Azure DevOps supports the two latest releases of Azure DevOps Server at a given time. Releases include updates and major releases. Currently the following versions of Azure DevOps Server are supported for import:

  • Azure DevOps Server 2019.1.1
  • Azure DevOps Server 2019 Update 1

As @Daniel Mann mentioned above, the picture you posted showed the upgrade path from old versions TFS to Azure DevOps Server 2019 (Azure DevOps Server was previously named TFS), not Azure DevOps Service.

In summary, both hardware and software you use need to be upgrade. To migrate to Azure DevOps Service, you have to upgrade to TFS 2012.3/TFS 2013.5, and then upgrade to Azure DevOps Server 2019.1 (TFS 2019.1), after that, migrate to Azure DevOps Service.

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You need to use supported hardware/software versions, end of story.

The premise under which you're operating is incorrect: The upgrade path is from TFS 2012 to Azure DevOps Server 2019, which is the last on-prem upgrade step before you can use the migration tool to migrate it. You can't use the migration tool on TFS 2012; you need to be using Azure DevOps Server 2019.