Grant's TFS Grooming Guide (Think "How to keep your TFS looking nice and pretty [and working]...")

Grant Holliday’s blog - What does a well maintained Team Foundation Server look like?

After spending some time out in the field looking at customer’s TFS environments and more recently looking at some of Microsoft’s internal on-premises TFS deployments, I realized that some environments are configured and better maintained than others.

Some of the general concepts and the very TFS-specific configurations are talked about in Part 5 of my Professional Team Foundation Server 2012 book, but many of the basics were considered out of scope or assumed knowledge. Also, not everybody has read the book, even though it gets 5 stars and is considered “THE Reference for the TFS Administrator and expert!” on Amazon.

The purpose of this blog post is to give the Service Owners of TFS a check-list of things to hold different roles accountable for in the smooth operation of the server. It’s broken into 5 sections that roughly translate to the different roles in a typical enterprise IT department. In some cases, it might all be the one person. In other cases, it could be a virtual team of 50 spread all throughout the company and the globe.

1. The initial setup and provisioning of the hardware, operating system and SQL platform
2. Regular OS system administrator tasks
3. Regular SQL DBA tasks
4. TFS-specific configurations
5. Regular TFS administrator tasks

The list is in roughly descending priority order, so even if you do the first item in each section, that’s better than not doing any of them. I’ll add as many reference links as I can, but if you need specific instructions for the steps, leave a comment and I’ll queue up a follow-up blog post.

• Keep Current ...
• Initial OS Configuration and Regular Management Tasks ...
• Initial SQL Configuration ...
• Regular SQL DBA Maintenance ...
• TFS Configuration Optimizations ...
• Regular TFS Administrator Maintenance ...
• Regular TFS Build Administrator Maintenance ...
• Exit Procedures ...
• Other Resources ...

While I'm sure we'll be chatting about this in the next RadioTFS cast, I thought this deserved additional highlighting (and note to myself that as an accidental TFS Admin, I need to do this stuff...)