1. I have lived majority of my life in Mumbai, India. Mumbai is financial capital of India with more than 13million people. My dad was mechanical engineer in Indian Navy so we lived in Navy Nagar. Our apartment was on 12^th floor and you could see the ocean from our building. Mumbai is the most happening city in the world. J Following is sort of view I had from my house.

   

2. I love traveling. In one of my past jobs I use to travel a lot. I had become so efficient at it, that for couple of years I had not seen take off and landing of flights. I use to sleep as soon as I entered the flight and got up when flight landed. J I have visited around 10 countries and worked with more than 55 customers. I have driven in almost every country; my worst experience of driving was in Rome, Italy. J
3. I have been on the fore front of innovation in supply chain industry for past few years, with RFID technology. I was involved in making a RFID reader platform for Sirit which was released to market few months back. Watch out for RFID in next few years it will touch every aspect of life.
4. I am passionate about learning. I have various certifications from Microsoft (MCSD, MCAD.NET), IBM, Sun, APICS etc… I took some classes in Ice skating few years back, don't know if I learnt to skate but I became really good at falling, finally I realized sports are not for me. Currently I am doing my MBA once my MBA is done next I want to learn flying. That has been my dream since I was a kid.
5. Longest stretch I have ever worked was for 7 days and 7 nights when I was working for eET. We had a big event in Rome coming up and my CEO wanted to launch our new product EPM, which was not even in design phase. I had to get a demo able version ready in 1 week and then present it at the launch. I gave everything I had, worked day in and day out. We almost worked for 22 hours a day. I attended the launch and after that my body gave up. I just slept for days. Those 2 weeks were most satisfying of my life. J

http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2006/11/24/tfs-and-reliability-and-disaster-recovery.aspx

Please let us know your feedback on the same. Do you need any additional information which will be helpful in making your TFS environment more reliable?

Caution: This is not an officially supported configuration. I have tried it and it works fine. Please test this on your test environments before trying it in production.

Terminology: Primary Server – Main TFS Data Tier, Secondary Server – Backup Data tier Server

Before you begin you should have installed SQL Server 2005 on secondary server. Following are the steps to setup Log Shipping for TFS

Configure Log shipping

1. Connect to the primary server using SQL Server Management Studio
2. Repeat steps 3-8 for all the TFS Databases(list provided below)
3. Right Click on each database and select properties
4. On Properties dialog select Transaction Log Shipping option
5. Select "Enable this as a primary database in a log shipping configuration"
6. Click on "Backup Settings" button, this should startup "Transaction Log Backup Settings"
   1. Enter the Network and local paths to the backup directory
   2. Enter reasonable time for delete and alert settings
   3. Click on "Schedule button" to open Job Schedule properties dialog. Select the schedule for transferring the transaction logs based on your environment. For example if you have primary server in US and Secondary in Asia you may want to schedule it for every hour. Once you have selected your schedule click "Ok"
   4. Click "OK" to get back to Database properties dialog.
7. Next Click on "Add" to add a secondary server. This will open a Secondary database settings dialog
   1. Click on "Connect" button and enter connection information to connect to secondary server
   2. Select "Yes, generate a full backup of the primary database and restore it into the secondary database (and create the secondary database if it doesn't exist)".
   3. Click "Restore options" button to select the location of data files and transaction log files on secondary server.
   4. Select the "Copy Files" tab and enter the destination folder for the copied files on secondary server.
   5. Click "OK" to get back to database properties dialog
8. Click on "OK" and the system will automatically setup the secondary database with log shipping setup.

Note: You should configure the transaction log shipping schedule (step 6.c) for all databases at same time. For e.g. all of them can run after every 1 hour starting 7:00PM 01/01/2007. This is crucial to keep the databases in sync.

Failover to the secondary Database

Important: To failover to the secondary server we have to failover all the databases at the same time.

1. On the Team Foundation application-tier server, prepare and stop the services.(Detailed steps)
2. On the new Team Foundation data-tier server

• Connect to the secondary server using SQL Server Management Studio.
• Run following TSQL Query for each TFS database. This will restore all the secondary databases and make them operational

  Restore database <TFSDBName> with Recovery

1. On the Team Foundation application-tier server, configure the application tier to use the new data tier.

• On the Team Foundation application-tier server, open the Command Prompt window.
• At the command prompt, locate the program file directory, and then type:

  cd Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation ServerTools

• Run the TFSAdminUtil tool with the RenameDT option to map the Application Tier to Secondary Server

TFSAdminUtil RenameDT <SecondaryServer>

1. On the Team Foundation application-tier server, reconfigure Report Server .(Detailed steps)
2. On the Team Foundation application-tier server, reconfigure SharePoint. (Detailed steps)
3. On the Team Foundation application-tier server, restart the services. (Detailed steps)
4. Update the work item cache. (Detailed steps)

TFS Databases: ReportServer, ReportServerTempDB, STS_Config_TFS, STS_Content_TFS, TfsBuild, TfsIntegration, TfsVersionControl, TfsWarehouse, TfsWorkItemTracking, TfsWorkItemTrackingAttachments, TfsActivityLogging

Note: We are working on officially supporting this configuration. I will keep you all updated

Please let me know if you tried using these steps and found them useful.

Link: http://blogs.msdn.com/jmanning/archive/2006/10/27/the-tfs-quot-extranet-quot-isapi-filter-mechanics.aspx

Join the chat on Wednesday, November 8^th, 2006 from 10:00am - 11:00am Pacific Time.

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Please let us know if you have any questions on the content in the paper.

Clustering provides automatic failover; Backup/restore provides long lead time recovering of server. SQL Mirroring can be used as a solution in between both of these options. SQL Mirroring provides warm standby but TFS does not support automatic failover with mirroring. Few manual steps need to be executed when the primary server fails with mirroring in TFS. We are working on a White paper to provide detailed steps on using SQL Mirroring for failover scenarios in TFS. We should have it ready within few weeks for everyone to use. Till then following are the high level steps required to use mirroring.

The process of configuring a VSTF deployment for mirroring can be defined in following steps

1. Backup databases from the main Data Tier Server(Principal server)
2. Restore backed up databases on mirror server.
3. Setup Mirroring for each database between Principal and Mirrored servers
4. Perform manual Failover to enable Mirrored Server as principal server.
   1. Manual failover when primary server is available can be performed using Management studio
   2. Manual failover when primary server is unavailable(Forced service Failover) can be performed using ALTER DATABASE command in TSQL Statements
5. Map Application Tier to talk to new Data Tier(Mirror Server)

More detailed Mirroring steps should be up on MSDN in next few weeks. I will keep all of you updated when that happens.

Looking at this level of customer focus across the organization I want to do my part. Here are two commitments from me to all our customers

1. I will be in constant touch with all customers through this blog. I will try to share information about what we are planning in the product and try to get your feedback on the same.
2. Regularly monitor and respond to questions on our forums. Forum link: http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowForum.aspx?ForumID=477&SiteID=1

I have been spending lot of time trying to catch up with all the functionality and understanding philosophy behind TFS. I still don’t know everything, but now I know people who know everything. So if you guys want to know anything about TFS in general and Admin/Ops in specific please please please feel free to shoot an email or leave a comment. I promise I will get back to you ASAP.

Thanks.

The primary goal of TFS Proxy is to cache Version Control files and reduce the network traffic. For e.g. if we have 2 offices one in US and another in Europe and the main TFS server is in US. We do not want every TFS user in Europe to download every VC file from US. So we can have a TFS proxy in Europe office and then TFS Proxy will help cache the files transferred between US and Europe hence improving performance. But all the authentication is still handled by the main TFS Server in this case the one in US. TFS Proxy does not authenticate users. It does check the validity of the user to allow him/her to access cached files, but the actual authentication is performed by TFS Server.

Here is a extract from MSDN help on how TFS Proxy validates the users.

Link to MSDN Document: Team Foundation Server Proxy