Upgrade vs. Migration: TFS Integration Platform

This is the seventh blog post in a series about Upgrade and Migration for TFS.

In some migration scenarios, neither upgrading servers nor losing history are viable options:

“I have Team Projects I need to migrate from one existing TFS 2008 server to another TFS 2008 server, and I need to keep the history”

In scenarios such as this one, using the TFS Integration Platform to preserve some history may be an option.  This platform was designed to facilitate the development of migration tools that connect other systems to TFS, and all of the logic to interface with TFS and move data between systems is provided with the platform.

Using the TFS Integration Platform to move data does allow historical versions of version control and work item tracking data to be preserved, but it has some of the same disadvantages of the Tip Migration approach: loss of date-time information, and changeset and work item IDs are not preserved.  Furthermore, migrations involving the TFS Integration Platform also suffer from the problem of time compression, that is, actions that occurred over a long period of time in the source system are replayed in a short amount of time in the destination.  The result of this time compression is that many of the reporting metrics of the destination TFS server are inaccurate.

The cost of using the TFS Integration Platform to migrate Team Projects is not trivial, and should be carefully weighed against the benefit of preserving some of the historical revisions.  Typically, this option should be reserved only when the other options previously discussed have been exhausted.  For more information, please visit the TFS Integration Platform CodePlex project page.