Setup of TFS for Virtualization

I was reminded today that the first step in working with TFS is to get it setup. If I were to start from scratch I'd do so with "virtualization" and a single-server dedicated server solution. Whether to go with Hyper-V, VMWare, Virtual Server, etc. all depends on your IT shop. I feel this way primarily because of the importance of backup/recovery procedures being reliable and straight-forward. The leading virtualization platforms have solid backup/recovery procedures in place that can be used effectively for TFS. I also recommend a one-server solution that's completely used for just TFS and its components and nothing else. Whoever is managing the backups/recoveries for your web servers, email servers, data servers, etc. ought to be the same person(s) managing these same processes for your TFS server(s).

See http://tinyurl.com/tfs2008hardware for the best timely article on TFS 2008 hardware recommendations. For most organizations running TFS it can be done with a 50 GB hard disk space server instance using the 32-bit edition of TFS 2008, 32-bit edition of SQL Server 2005 and a 32-bit edition of Windows Server 2003 or Windows Server 2008 OS. For virtualization during runtime it'll need to run with 2-3 GB of available RAM. I'd also plan for about 1 GB per month in hard disk growth. Now if the IT teams are putting up a lot of multimedia content as attachments then your space requirements will grow proportionally.

Some other links to read include:

http://msmvps.com/blogs/vstsblog/archive/2009/01/06/hardware-recommendations-for-team-foundation-server-2008.aspx
http://beyondthispoint.blogspot.com/2005/11/building-virtualized-team-foundation.html
http://www.woodwardweb.com/technology/increasing_the.html
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/tfssetup/threads

I'd also like to suggest bookmarking this site at http://www.tinyurl.com/TfsInfo and http://tinyurl.com/AlexReading.