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TFS 2008 Setup/Admin: Lipstick on the pig

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After leaving the version control team to work on the freshly created admin/ops team, we ended up taking over setup (for better or worse), so that first year was trying to make Orcas setup something at least slightly more palatable than Whidbey's.  We also tried to make those things that were not- or kinda- supported in Whidbey work a bit better, especially at setup time (analysis services on a machine other than the normal data tier, for instance - reporting services on a machine other than the app tier, WSS 3.0 of course, etc).

We're in the middle of working on vNext's story and while there's a lot of hope and cool things we're getting done, there's not a whole lot we can say about it just yet, but I wanted people to know that none of us consider the Orcas setup story to be the way it should be.  It's certainly an improvement from Whidbey, but we want to do better in the future... a lot better.

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Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 21, 2008
    One thing that could really help: separate out the installation of the bits from configuration/migration of the services. Once the bits are installed, there should be both an automated and manual process for installing/configuring the solution.  The automated one could be similar to what the installer does currently, assuming various defaults.  The manual process should walk-through the various steps and allow an admin to specify all parameters/locations.  There would be a document describing what needs to be run and when and with what parameters. That way if there are any non-standard settings, the admin can easily provide them to the config tool.  If any one part fails, the problem can be rectified without uninstalling/reverting everything. That'd be a huge help :) --Oren

  • Anonymous
    January 21, 2008
    That's exactly what we're doing, actually :) The installation will be little more than get the files on disk, and then configuration of TFS will happen afterwards - the result being that setup itself is going to succeed 99.44% of the time, and configuration may have problems here and there, but it won't result in a rollback of the product installation. Thanks, Oren!  Always good to hear we're on the right track :)