Team Foundation Server install guide

Team Foundation Server 2013, Update 4

This is the install guide for the latest release of Team Foundation Server 2013 - Update 4 (TFS 2013.4). For details on changes in Update 4, see the release notes.

To apply TFS 2013.4 to an existing installation of TFS, you upgrade. (This is different from applying Visual Studio's updates, which work more like traditional patches.) You can also install TFS 2013.4 the same as you would any other TFS 2013 release. To get started quickly with TFS, see the next section.

Get started quickly with Team Foundation Server

If you want to install Team Foundation Server with the least amount of preliminary work, use the basic configuration, which comes with SQL Server Express and requires the least amount of set up. The TFS installation wizard can configure everything for you in about 10 minutes, and you can ignore most of the instruction in this guide. You won’t get a report server or SharePoint, which means no HTML reports for your software projects, and no website to trade Office documents and collaborate, but you will have basic bug tracking, version control, and a website on the TFS server with team productivity features.

Tip

If you do use the basic configuration, consider installing it on a server operating system. If you install it on a server, you can always add a report server and SharePoint later, if you find your team needs them. If you install TFS on a client OS, adding these features is blocked, and you would have to first migrate TFS to a server OS.

Verify that your operating system and hardware meet the requirements for Team Foundation Server. For client operating systems, you can use 32-bit or 64-bit. For servers, you must use 64-bit.

For more information: System requirements for Team Foundation Server.

Run the Team Foundation Sever install (tfs_server.exe) from the product DVD, and then use the basic configuration wizard to configure your installation.

For more information: Run Team Foundation Server installation and Configure Team Foundation Server using the basic configuration.

Tip

After you set up TFS, the next thing to do is use Visual Studio to create a team project.

Install or upgrade Team Foundation Server

• Install Team Foundation Server
  You can install Team Foundation Server and all its prerequisites on one or more servers. This is scenario is for teams that want the full experience of TFS with options for SharePoint and an HTML report server, or teams that want to customize their installation.

• Upgrade Team Foundation Server
  You can upgrade from an earlier release of Team Foundation Server.

Customize your ALM environment

Add a build server or proxy to your ALM environment. Integrate Project Server or add an installation of SharePoint Products to your Team Foundation Server deployment.

• Set up Team Foundation Build Service
  Team Foundation Build Service can help you automatically build and share code.

• Use an answer file and a command-line tool to configure TFS
  Not everyone will need this tool. Use it to configure TFS on different machines. For example, you might want to configure multiple build servers using the same answer file, which would help ensure the same configuration across multiple servers.

  This tool does not perform the initial installation of TFS but configures it (according to your specifications) after the TFS bits are present on the computer.

• How to: Set up remote SharePoint Products for Team Foundation Server
  If you don’t want to run SharePoint Products on the same computer as Team Foundation Server, you can use Team Foundation Server Extensions for SharePoint Products to integrate SharePoint with Team Foundation Server. You can also use the TFS installation wizard to install SharePoint Foundation 2013.

• How to: Create a Team Foundation server farm (high availability)
  You can add an application-tier server to an existing deployment of Team Foundation Server to build redundancy into your deployment or to restore a failed application-tier server. 

• How to: Install Team Foundation Proxy and set up a remote site
  You might save bandwidth by installing Team Foundation Server Proxy, which caches version control files so that developers working at remote locations don’t have to repeatedly download the same files.

• How to: Add Project Server to Team Foundation Server
  If you have team members that use Project Server, you can use Team Foundation Server Extensions for Project Server to integrate Project Server with Team Foundation Server.

• Install Release Management
  Release Management provides a continuous deployment solution that makes release cycles repeatable, visible, and more efficient by automating deployments through every environment from Team Foundation Server (TFS) to production.