Microsoft Project Server / Team Foundation Server / Subversion / Wiki on same box

Question

Hi all,

We are in the process of setting up a new development environment for about a dozen developers in our IT department, and I've got a few questions as far as server setup goes..

We're going to be using TFS 2008 for our 6 or so .NET developers, and subversion for the half dozen CF people.

Is it ok/recommended/not recommended to have both source control repositories on the same box? We'd be setting up TFS as a single-server environment with SQL server on the same machine.

Also, some management would like to use Project Server. We've already been through a bad install of project server where it messed up our TFS sharepoint and reporting services, and I haven't had any results from google saying that anyone out there has set up Project Server and TFS on the same box. Should we install Project Server on a separate box?

We are also going to set up a 3rd party Wiki, not sure if it will be hosted in IIS or Apache.

So basically, I'm asking for overall advice on setting up this environment, separation of servers/concerns, best practices, things we definitely should not do. This is all in a virtual environment, so there's not really a limit on number of servers.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You should be ok (with some caveats, below) so long as you throw enough CPU/RAM/spindles at the machine to keep all the services running smoothly.

The most painful part is likely to be the web services. Here is a great document on setting up Project Server & TFS to use the same Sharepoint backend: http://sharepointmagazine.net/technical/administration/integrating-project-server-2007-and-team-foundation-server-2008-sharepoint-sites Consolidating your WSS/MOSS repositories isn't just good for users; it nips your most likely setup failure in the bud.

The wiki shouldn't be a big deal as long as it doesn't insist on living @ port 80. It's possible to install 3rd party sites as vdirs underneath Sharepoint, but every time I do so I end up spending way more time than if I'd avoided the problem route from the start. Getting people to browse to a non-standard port isn't ideal, but setting up some form of indirection (read: bookmarks) shouldn't be hard.

Subversion clients & servers are both trivial to configure on any port you like.

All that said -- if you have the resources to do so, separate VMs for each product is likely to make future maintenance easier. You can apply patches that require an iisreset or reboot; rollback to a snapshot; dynamically throttle CPU / bandwidth / disk space; and so on while the other VMs keep merrily serving requests.