Professional Team Foundation Server

1.5. Hardware Requirements

The best source of information for system requirements is the installation documentation. One reason we are discussing the hardware requirements in this chapter is because a lot of practical information is not covered in the documentation.

NOTE

One of the hardware components you can never have enough of is memory. The more memory you have installed on your target machines, the more satisfactory your experience with Team System will be in terms of responsiveness and capacity. If you are to choose which machine to add the memory, choose the database server, as it will deliver the optimal results.

1.5.1. Team Foundation Server

According to the documentation, Team Foundation Server requires a minimum of 1 gigabyte of RAM. (This includes the application tier and the data tier.) Based on private testing, you are better off assigning at least 2 gigabytes of RAM for the server (one gigabyte for the server component, one gigabyte for SQL Server 2005).

Team Foundation Server has preset capacity limits. Read the capacity document at http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2005/11/28/497666.aspx to learn more about the number of work items the software can handle in heavier load situations.

1.5.2. Team Foundation Build

The hardware requirements for Team Foundation Build requirements are the same as the Visual Studio 2005 system requirements for the most part, except that support is limited to Windows XP Professional with SP2 and Windows Server 2003 with SP1 Standard ...