Microsoft's Team Foundation Server Deployment Topology

Brian Harry

August 22nd, 20060 0

Given how much I talk about our internal “dogfooding” of TFS on this blog, I thought you might be interested in seeing a diagram of what our internal deployment actually looks like. This diagram was put together by our IT department a couple of weeks ago. It shows the basic network topology, regions we have servers and the number and purpose of various servers. I don’t even know what all of them are but I’ll point out some highlights.

We have servers both on the intranet and the extranet.
There are servers and/or proxies in each of 5 different regions around the world and accessed from more places than that. We’re in the process of setting up a proxy in China right now but it wasn’t in place at the time this diagram was made.
DevDiv – The server used by Developer Division (this is the server I publish all of my dogfood stats about).
MSIT – The server used by internal Microsoft IT teams.
MSCOM – The server for development done in the Microsoft.com organization.
PG Consolidated – A collection of “smaller” (generally less than 100 people) teams from around the company.
MSN – The server used by a collection of MSN teams (although the entire MSN org has not adopted TFS yet).
EVAL OFFICE – Office is currently in the process of evaluating TFS for use in developing their next release. We set up this server for them to experiment with to help them get familiar with TFS, decide what customizations they will need to make, etc.
SQL – The server being used by the SQL Server team. They are only using TFS for work item tracking right now.
EVAL SPCore – This is a general eval server for teams that want to try out TFS. “SPCore” derives from the name of our internal adoption team – the Solution Provider team. They help teams with the process of adopting TFS.
EVAL * – More Evaluation servers.
Pre-production environment – A set of virtual machines that we can use to load images of production servers to test various maintenance and upgrade procedures without putting production machines in jeopardy.
Monitoring – We have a set of monitoring servers that perform various tasks including measuring availability and performance of other servers and mirroring checkins and work item changes between TFS and the internal team development tools we are gradually migrating away from.
Extranet – a server set up for external partners who collaborate with Microsoft to use.

I’ve attached the Visio diagram to this post if you’d like a much higher quality rendering of the image.