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.

Important

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.

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.

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 or Enterprise Edition. If you have a small project with 5 to 20 users, Team Foundation Build requires at minimum a single processor running 766 GHz, an 8-gig hard drive and 256MB of memory. At the most, in a large project (spanning 250 users or more), Team Foundation Build requires a CPU with dual processors running at 2.8 GHz, 80GB of hard drive space, and at least 2GB of RAM.

Important

Build requirements also are based on the duration of the project build. If less than 30 minutes, 1.5 GHz with 512MB RAM is fine. For medium size team with projects taking less than two hours to build, 2.6 GHz with 1GB RAM. For a large team, you will want dual 2.8 GHz with 2GB RAM.

SQL Server 2005

In a dual-server scenario, the data tier of Team Foundation Server requires a CPU with a single (or dual) processor(s) running at 2.2 GHz, 80GB of hard drive space, and 2GB of RAM. This should be ample to support from 100 to 250 users.

If your team is much larger, you should spec out your target server-class machine to have at least a CPU with quadruple processors running at 2.2 GHz, 150GB of free hard drive space, and at the minimum 4GB of RAM.

Visual Studio 2005

At the bare minimum, Visual Studio 2005 requires a CPU with a 2.0 GHz processor, 512MB of RAM, and 8GB of free hard drive space. Even though Microsoft states that 512MB is enough, my practical experience has shown that 1GB is the minimum required for any acceptable level of performance. Microsoft's recommended hardware requirements include a 2.6 GHz processor, 1GB of RAM, and 20GB of free hard drive space.

Other Tools

The minimum specification for a test agent (also known as a test rig) is a single processor running at 600 GHz, 1GB of hard drive space, and at the very least 256MB of RAM. The maximum requirement (assuming you have over 250 users) is a CPU with dual processors running at 2.8 GHz, 8GB of free hard drive space, and at least 2GB of memory.

The test controller has slightly different specifications. The minimum specification (roughly 5 to 20 users) is a CPU with a single processor running at 600 MHz, 1GB of hard drive space, and 256MB of RAM. For larger projects (and a greater number of users) you should spec out a machine with a single processor running at 2.6 GHz, 48GB of hard drive space, and, at the very minimum, 1GB of RAM.

64-Bit Support

Team Foundation Server (the application tier) will not run on 64-bit systems; you must install it on a 32-bit machine. As a result, you obviously can't set up a single-server install (application tier and data tier) on a single 64-bit system. The data tier (SQL Server 2005) will run on a 64-bit machine, you just need to install SQL Server 2005 64-Bit Edition. Team Foundation Build and Visual Studio 2005 will run on 64-bit machines but only in WOW64 compatibility mode.