Migrating from TFS 2013 to Azure DevOps Server 2019: Pre-prod v/s Prod migration

Question

I need to migrate a TFS 2013 instance to Azure DevOps Server 2019. I want to setup a new instance of Azure DevOps server with all the data migrated over from TFS 2013 and both the instances up and running at the same time. The plan is to decommission the TFS 2013 instance after a few weeks.

For testing purposes, I followed the steps below: 1. Setup a server in a completly isolated network. 2. Backed up the TFS 2013 databases using the scheduled backups from TFS admin console. 3. Restored the databases to a new instance of SQL Server 2017. 4. Started installation of Azure DevOps Server 2019 on the new server, I pointed it to the restored databases and it detected the schema and gave me two options: Production Upgrade and Pre-production upgrade testing. I chose the latter option.

The installation wizard took care of remapping the db connection strings(tfsconfig remapdbs), changing server and collection ids(tfsconfig changeserverid) and removed the scheduled backup jobs to avoid conflicts with the existing TFS 2013 instance.

The test migration completed successfully. Now, I want to setup the production instance on new servers that are within the same network as the existing TFS 2013 instance. Shall I select "pre-production upgrade testing" again as I need to have both TFS 2013 and 2019 running at the same time? Or Shall I select "Production Upgrade" this time? Is there anything I need to take care of during the upgrade so that the two instance don't conflict with each other?

PS: there are no backup jobs running on the TFS 2013 instance.

Answer 1

I tried the "Production upgrade" and understood that it will perform an in-place upgrade. In my scenario, I wanted to setup a separate new instance and the "Pre-Production Upgrade Testing" is the appropriate choice in this case as it automatically takes care of the remapping of database connection string and change server and collection identifiers.