Hardware Recommendations for Team Foundation Server 2008
What hardware do I need to run TFS? Well, it depends on how much load you are going to generate. But what is a solid hardware configuration to start?
Microsoft recommends for the Single-Server installation of TFS:
Additionally they recommend switching to a Dual-Server configuration (TFS & MSSQL installed on separate machines) if you have more than 450 users (Note: this is really just a rough orientation - many other factors are important).
Sources: here and here.
We recommend the following minimum based on our experiences
(recommendations for better performance in brackets):
| # Developers | Configuration | CPU | RAM* | HDD** |
| <= 20 | single server | 2 x 2.2 GHz | 2.5 GB (3 GB) | 80 GB |
| <= 100 | single server | 4 x 2.2 GHz | 3 GB (4 GB) | 250 GB |
| > 100*** | dual server | 2 x 2.6 / 4 x 2.2 GHz | 4 / 8 GB (16 GB) | 500 GB |
Disclaimer: All values shown here do vary depending on the individual situation.
A few general notes
* Increasing the amount of memory (RAM) clearly improves performance (be aware TFS Application Tier is 32-bit only and hence limited to ~ 3.5 GB)
** Hard drive speed is very important to MSSQL and therefore for TFS. The use of fast hard drives and disk arrays is heavily recommended.
*** Splitting TFS and MSSQL is a good idea if you experience heavy load and slow response times on a single server installation. [More]
However more than just the number of developers should be considered in this case, e.g. licensing issues, existing SQL infrastructure, backups in place, etc.
A reliable network connection with a minimum bandwidth of 1 Mbps and a latency maximum of 350ms is required.
The use of virtualization technologies (Virtual Server, Hyper-V, VMware) is possible and mostly recommended by us for backup and fail-over reasons.
More official Hardware Recommendations (our recommendation in brackets):