TFS 2013 Compatibility and Dependencies

Before you upgrade your current version of Team Foundation Server (TFS) or set up a new environment, it's important to know about pre-requisites, dependencies, and other components of upgrades and environments. Using a particular version of TFS will likely drive the other versions software you must have, so the effects of an upgrade can be far-reaching. This guide will help clarify the dependencies associated with TFS 2013 and put the requirements and special considerations in one place. You should read it carefully before you upgrade or start a new environment.

In this topic

• TFS Upgrades

• TFS 2013 major dependencies

  • Operating systems

  • SQL Server

  • SharePoint

  • Project Server

• TFS 2013 minor dependencies

  • Browsers

  • Office (client products)

  • The .NET Framework

  • Hyper-V

  • System Center Virtual Machine Manager

  • Hardware requirements

• Client compatibility

  • Visual Studio and Team Explorer Support

  • Team Explorer Everywhere

  • Git Clients

  • MSSCCI

  • TFS Object Model

• Other tooling

  • On-Premises Build Controllers and Agents

  • On-Premises Proxy

  • Test Case Management (TCM)

  • Visual Studio Online Services

  • TFS PowerTools

TFS Upgrades

Before we dive into compatibility with other dependencies, we’ll take a moment to discuss upgrade options from previous versions of TFS. If you are upgrading TFS, your experience will differ based on how old your previous version of TFS is. In TFS 2013, we support direct upgrades from TFS 2012 (RTM or QU4), and TFS 2010. If you use TFS 2008 or TFS 2005, you need to install an intermediate release before you install TFS 2013.

If you upgrade from TFS 2005, you must install TFS 2010 RTM or TFS 2010 SP1 before you install TFS 2013. If you upgrade from TFS 2008, you can choose which intermediate version to install (either TFS 2010 or TFS 2012); however, we recommend TFS 2012 because the upgrade experience from TFS 2012 to TFS 2013 is more automated than upgrades from 2010.

You can upgrade TFS in-place or you can migrate your instance to new hardware. If you move to TFS 2013 from an older version of TFS that does not have any supported operating systems in common, you will need to perform a migration. Another reason to perform a migration upgrade would be to move to more powerful hardware or to scale out your environment to support heavier usage. But if these factors do not apply to you, we recommend an in-place upgrade. For more information about the upgrade process, visit our documentation on MSDN or our supplemental upgrade guide written by the ALM Rangers. Those just getting started can read through some FAQ’s about upgrade here.

TFS 2013 major dependencies – supported versions

A list of all supported versions of each TFS dependency, each version in a separate section, is summarized in the next table. Each section starts with a table that also shows the versions that were supported in TFS 2012 and TFS 2010, so if you’re planning an upgrade you will know which dependencies you need to update. If minor versions are not explicitly called out, you can assume that all minor versions are supported. To reduce clutter, the supported editions of each product are only listed for versions currently supported in TFS 2013.

Operating systems

This section covers operating system dependencies, separated by server and client operating system.

Server operating systems support table

Client operating system support table

Special considerations

• TFS has limited support for 32-bit operating systems. We only support 64-bit versions of server operating systems, and only support a subset of TFS features on 32-bit client operating systems. Proxy, SharePoint Extensions, and the Standard Application Tier wizard cannot be run on 32-bit machines. Note that if you would like to configure TFS on a 32-bit machine using the Advanced Application Tier wizard, you cannot enable SharePoint or Reporting, since these products require a server operating system. If you plan to install SQL Server and TFS on the same machine, please keep in mind that SQL Enterprise cannot be installed on a client OS.

• In the past we supported earlier versions of Windows for TFS Build machines than we did for the Application Tier. This is not true in TFS 2013 – the operating system support is the same. If you plan to update your Build machines when you update TFS, pay close attention to the OS running on those servers. That being said, TFS 2013 can talk to older versions of Build. See the section titled “Build” under “Compatibility.”

• You can install TFS in various languages on supported operating systems in various languages, but you can’t use every combination of localized operating system and TFS together. Here are the rules:

  • If you’re not running an English language operating system, you must install the English version of TFS or the version of TFS that has been localized for the same language as the operating system.

  • If you’re running an English language operating system, you can install any language version of TFS.

  • For more information about language options, read Language requirements for Team Foundation Server.

For more information about operating system requirements, read System requirements for Team Foundation Server.

SQL Server

This section covers SQL Server dependencies for TFS.

Support table

¹ TFS 2013 with update 2 (TFS 2013.2) adds support for SQL Server 2014 (see “Special considerations”).

² We strongly recommend installing CU2 or higher on top of SQL Server 2012 SP1.

Special considerations

• If you want to use Reporting (in the same SQL instance the TFS uses), you must install SQL Standard or Enterprise. SQL Express does not support this feature.

• TFS 2010 and TFS 2013 do not have any SQL versions in common, so you will need to perform a migration upgrade or upgrade their SQL Server and then their TFS Server during a single period of downtime.

• The version of SQL Express installed with TFS Express is 2012 SP1. We will upgrade SQL Express 2008 R2 and 2012 RTM as long as it’s a default instance. This means the versions of SQL Express installed with TFS 2012 and 2010 are both upgradeable. Lower versions of SQL Express will be blocked and require a manual upgrade.

• To work with Team Foundation Server, the collation settings for SQL Server must be case insensitive, accent sensitive, and not binary. If you have multiple SQL Server instances, the collation settings that you use must be the same across all these servers. For more information about collation settings, read: SQL Server Collation Requirements for Team Foundation Server

• SQL Server 2014 has increased hardware requirements compared with previous versions. Certain configurations might hurt TFS performance. For more information, read TFS 2013 Update 2: performance considerations using SQL Server 2014.

For more information about SQL Server requirements, read SQL Server requirements for Team Foundation Server.

SharePoint

This section covers SharePoint dependencies for TFS.

Support table

¹ Windows SharePoint Services is the equivalent of the Foundation editions in current SharePoint products. In 2010, Microsoft began using a different product naming strategy.

Special considerations

• Before installing SharePoint, be sure to review the prerequisites and recommended services detailed on their requirements page. Installing SharePoint Foundation through the TFS Standard wizard will install all the necessary prerequisites as well.

• Note that you may need to upgrade your SharePoint farm when upgrading TFS. Be sure to plan accordingly – SharePoint only supports upgrades from the most recent previous version, so jumping multiple versions may be time consuming.

• Pay close attention to the operating systems that SharePoint supports. SharePoint can only be installed on server operating systems. Furthermore, your choice of operating system can limit the version of SharePoint available to you. For example, SharePoint 2013 without any service pack does not support Windows Server 2012 R2. To gain support for Windows Server 2012 R2, you must use SharePoint 2013 with SP1 (get it now). Similarly, SharePoint 2010 with no service pack does not support Windows Server 2012, but SharePoint 2010 with SP2 adds support for Windows Server 2012.

  • SharePoint frequently releases KB’s to fix compatibility issues on different versions of Windows. Ensure that you install these KB’s to guarantee full functionality. See their requirements pagefor more information.

• You should consider installing SharePoint on a different server – in addition to having different system requirements from TFS, SharePoint requires a lot of memory and does not share resources well. You should definitely put SharePoint on a dedicated server if your TFS application tier and data tier are on the same machine, or if you plan to use SharePoint extensively or with products other than TFS.

• If you plan to share SQL Servers between SharePoint 2010 and TFS, you will need at least SP1 on top of SharePoint 2010 in order to have SQL 2012 SP1 support.

• If you have multiple TFS instances that integrate with the same SharePoint instance, this will affect the version of the SharePoint Extensions you need to install on your SharePoint Server. If the TFS instances are different versions, you should install the version of the SharePoint Extensions that corresponds to the latest version of TFS connecting to SharePoint. Remember that these extensions must be installed both on the TFS servers and on the SharePoint server. The TFS 2013 SharePoint extensions are back-compatible and will be able to talk to TFS 2012 and TFS 2010 servers. There is no backward compatibility with TFS 2008 and TFS 2005, but there is also no overlap between the versions of SharePoint these releases support and the versions that are supported by TFS 2013.

• The language of SharePoint has to match the language of your TFS deployment. However, you can add an appropriate language pack to SharePoint to meet the requirements for TFS. For more information on TFS language options, read Language requirements for Team Foundation Server

For more information about SharePoint requirements, read SharePoint Products requirements for Team Foundation Server

Project Server

This section covers Project Server dependencies for TFS.

Support table

Special considerations

• TFS does not have any topology requirements for Project Server, but we recommend you run Project Server on a separate server from TFS for performance reasons.

• Project Server has a dependency on SharePoint, so you should also pay close attention to SharePoint’s requirements when planning your deployment.

• To install Project Server 2010 on Windows Server 2012, you will need SP2.

• Like SharePoint, Project Server is only compatible with 64-bit server operating systems. For further discussion of Project Server’s hardware and software requirements—including feature specific requirements—see this topic.

• If you upgrade your Project Server, there’s a special procedure you need to follow to maintain the connection to TFS. For more information, see this topic.

• Unlike the SharePoint extensions, the Project Server extensions only install on the Project Server, and not on the Team Foundation Server. You should install the Project Server Extensions that match the version of TFS you are using.

• Project Server users use an MSProject add-in that is installed with their Visual Studio clients. Support for this add-in mirrors overall support for Visual Studio (explained in Visual Studio and Team Explorer Support). Since this add-in was first shipped with Visual Studio 2010 SP1, all versions are still compatible with TFS 2013.

For more information about Project Server requirements, read: Project Server requirements for Team Foundation Server

TFS 2013 minor dependencies – supported versions

These are more minor dependencies, but it’s helpful to have a comprehensive list of what is supported or required. In some cases, you can install TFS without these minor dependencies, or installing them to take care of a dependency is a trivial matter.

Browsers

The following browsers are supported for connecting to TFS through Team Web Access.

Internet Explorer

Safari (on Mac only)

Firefox and Chrome

Because Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome now automatically update themselves, TFS 2013 only supports the most recent version of each.

Special considerations

• In addition to the browser requirements of TFS, your Visual Studio clients - including Team Explorer - may have different requirements. You will need one installation of Visual Studio that is the same version as TFS in order to create new team projects, so pay close attention to these requirements.

  • Visual Studio 2013 originally did not release with support for Internet Explorer 8. With Visual Studio 2013 Update 1, limited support for Internet Explorer 8 (including Team Project creation) was added back.

Office (client products)

This section covers Office productivity tools dependencies for TFS.

Support table

Special considerations

• If you are using SharePoint with TFS, you will need to add SP2 to Office 2007 and SP1 to Office 2010 for integration between Office and SharePoint.

• SharePoint 2010 does not support Office 2013.

The .NET Framework

In TFS 2013, TFS, the TFS Object Model, Team Build, and all client assemblies are built against .NET 4.5.1. When you install TFS, the .NET Framework will be installed on your machine if it isn’t already there.

Hyper-V

In general, our Hyper-V support will match our operating system support.

System Center Virtual Machine Manager

In general, our SCVMM support will match our operating system support.

Hardware requirements

Our hardware requirements remain unchanged since TFS 2010. For a full description of our hardware requirements, read System requirements for Team Foundation Server

Client compatibility

Our MSDN topic on client compatibility is located here.

Visual Studio and Team Explorer Support

We define three levels of client support for different versions of Visual Studio and Team Explorer. Only the latest version has “full” compatibility with the latest Team Foundation Server, because this will be the only client that contains components that can interface with new features for that release, and will also be the only client from which you can perform certain administrative tasks such as creating new team projects. Previous versions will have varying levels of support below that, depending on how old they are. If you are using mismatched versions of client and server, you should ensure that your build machines are at the same version as your TFS application tier.

Next, we describe the level of support that we guarantee with each client version. Keep in mind that additional functionality other than what is listed below might continue to work using older clients—in fact, it often does—but is outside the scope of what we test and support officially.

Full feature support

Any TFS-facing functionality exposed in the UI of Visual Studio and Team Explorer should work. We guarantee full feature support between client and server of the same version.

Note: If you are using the latest version of Visual Studio, but will continue to use the most recent previous version of Team Foundation Server (either temporarily or permanently), you can expect a high level of compatibility here as well. All non-administrative scenarios will be supported.

High level of support

If you are running the most recent previous version of Visual Studio or Team Explorer (Visual Studio 2012, if you are on TFS 2013), then you can expect most features to be supported from Visual Studio. You might need to install the latest update, but after doing so, mainline scenarios for all non-admin personas will be supported. This includes features needed for developers and testers to continue their daily work, such as queuing builds, running queries, viewing documents, and getting, editing, and checking in files. Program Managers should also be able to continue using most features relevant to them, but might need to rely on web access for some scenarios, such as managing areas and iterations, and writing new queries.

Older process templates that were in use with the previous version of Team Foundation Server should continue to be compatible with the new server.

General support

If a client is two versions older than your server, you can expect general support (after installing a compatibility GDR). This will look similar to the high level of support you see when Visual Studio is one release older than TFS; however, the experience for some non-mainline scenarios may be degraded but not entirely blocked. Non-admins should still be able to continue unimpeded in their daily work, and older process templates should remain compatible with the new server.

MSSCCI support

Visual Studio/Team Explorer 2008 and Visual Studio 2005 are no longer officially supported. To connect to the server, these clients must interface through the MSSCCI provider instead. MSSCCI support only includes support for source control integration and MSSCCI commands. The goal is simply to allow developers to continue working with legacy applications in an upgraded server. For more information about the MSSCCI provider, see the section below called “MSSCCI.”

Support matrix from MSDN

Team Explorer Everywhere

A new version of Team Explorer Everywhere is released with each version of TFS. You should try to use the version of Team Explorer Everywhere that corresponds to the version of your Team Foundation Server; however, recent versions of Team Explorer Everywhere have had forward and backward compatibility with all versions of TFS. If you need support for an older version of Eclipse, Java, or an Operating System, you may choose to use an older version of TE Team Explorer Everywhere E that encompasses the range you need. Multiple versions of Team Explorer Everywhere can also be installed side-by-side if you are running multiple versions of Eclipse.

The following table includes all versions of Team Explorer Everywhere that are compatible with TFS 2013, and lists other TFS and Eclipse compatibility.

More information about supported operating systems and Java version support is included on the download page for each version of Team Explorer Everywhere. The download page for Team Explorer Everywhere 2013 RTM is located here.

Git Clients

We will support any Git clients that work with the standard protocol, and major ones (listed below) will be tested regularly.

MSSCCI

The MSSCCI provider can be used to connect older versions of Visual Studio as well as other clients to Team Foundation Server. The TFS functionality available when leveraging MSSCCI is limited to version control operations. In general, the version of your MSSCCI provider should match the version of TFS that you are using; however, if you have a client running on Windows XP or Vista, you should use MSSCCI 2010 to connect to TFS 2013 (see next alert for more information). Please note that unlike Visual Studio, different versions of the MSSCCI Provider cannot be installed side-by-side.

MSSCCI Provider 2013 supports the following software:

• Visual Studio 2008

• Visual Studio 2005

• Visual Studio .NET 2003

• Visual C++ 6 SP6

• Visual Basic 6 SP6

• SQL Server Management Studio

TFS Object Model

The TFS Object Model may be used for developing applications that integrate with TFS. It is the same Object Model included with Visual Studio and Team Explorer, but will allow other applications to connect to TFS without a Visual Studio client. When developing third-party applications that use the TFS Object Model, you should select a version that is at the same level or greater than the version of the Team Foundation Server you are targeting. The Object Model is backwards compatible with previous versions of TFS. There is no guaranteed forward compatibility, but the Object Model is usually compatible with servers that are one major version higher (this may require installing a GDR). Multiple versions of the TFS Object Model can be installed side-by-side.

Other tooling

This section specifies other tooling.

On-Premises Build Controllers and Agents

TFS 2013 supports integration with Team Build 2010 and 2012. You may want to use an older version of Build if you are using Build servers against multiple versions of TFS, or you need to leverage servers with older operating systems in your TFS instance. Team Build 2010 supports operating systems as far back as Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.

Note that there is no guaranteed forward compatibility between a later version of Build and an earlier version of the TFS Application Tier.

On-Premises Proxy

TFS 2013 is only officially supported against the 2013 version of Proxy, although the previous version of Proxy is still likely to work.

Test Case Management (TCM)

In the next table, we outline the supported Microsoft Test Manager (MTM) connectivity with TFS, and what is required for it to work:

The Microsoft Test Manager environment also includes Test Agents (TA) and Test Controllers (TC) to run tests against your code. Here is the compatibility matrix between different versions of agents and controllers against different versions of TFS:

Visual Studio Online Services

You can use online services with an on-premises TFS instance and vice versa.

Leveraging cloud features against on-premises TFS

Companies can adopt Visual Studio Online services on their own terms while still keeping other ALM activities with TFS on-premises. Many companies, for example, might want to keep their source code on-premises but leverage Visual Studio Online for Load Testing and Application Insights. The Application Insights visualization (such as reports, alerts, dashboards, etc.) is all cloud based and not available on-premises. But like cloud based Load Testing, Application Insights can interact with your on-premises Team Foundation servers. All the Application Insights to Visual Studio integration for things like IntelliTrace, Memory Events and deployment markers work great in this hybrid configuration.

Leveraging TFS features against Visual Studio Online

Likewise, some customers host their code in the cloud but leverage on-premises TFS for Build and Proxy; there are configuration options in the wizards or configuration files to support this. These are currently the only two integration points for TFS when source is kept in the cloud.

We recommend you use the latest release of TFS whenever you use features in the cloud in conjunction with your on-premises instance; however, you likely will not experience any problems when running on older versions.

TFS PowerTools

Determining which version of the PowerTools you need to run is easy if you are using the same version of Visual Studio and TFS, but making the distinction when you have mismatched versions can be difficult.  Some PowerTools that target Team Foundation Server and use the server object model, but others target Visual Studio and the client object model. This complicates the matter even further.

The general rule is that you need to have parity between the version of the PowerTools you install and the object model you are targeting. You also need to make sure the PowerTools are installed in the right place—the PowerTools should be installed on the same machine as the program that will use it (which is usually, but not always, the same machine as the OM it is targeting). If you have different versions of Visual Studio and TFS installed on the same machine, or multiple versions of Visual Studio, you can install multiple versions of the PowerTools side-by-side to accommodate the needs of each program, unless otherwise noted below. 

Compatibility matrix

The following table explains how to decide which version of each PowerTool to use and where to install it. If you are using both TFS and Visual Studio 2013, you should install the 2013 version of every PowerTool. Keep in mind that there is only one release of the PowerTools for each major version, so you do not need to worry about compatibility issues between updates.

Compatibility of the PowerTools across clients and servers

¹ Client = Team Explorer or any Visual Studio SKU except Visual Studio Express.  The PowerTools cannot be used with Visual Studio Express.  If you are running Visual Studio Express, download Team Explorer for free to use most of the PowerTools (everything except the Process Template Editor)

² The cells above which say “any client version” or “any server version” signify the following:

• “Any client version:” Any client that is compatible (and supported) against the same version of TFS as the PowerTools you are looking at will be able to integrate with those PowerTools. For the 2013 PowerTools, this would be Visual Studio 2010, Visual Studio 2012 and Visual Studio 2013.

• “Any server version:” Any server that is compatible (and supported) against the same version of Visual Studio as the PowerTools you are looking at will be able to integrate with those PowerTools. For the 2013 PowerTools, this would be TFS 2010, TFS 2012 and TFS 2013.

³ As you can see above, most of the PowerTools that depend on the version of the client can be installed once for each version of the client that you have.  The exception to this rule is the Windows extensions, where as a limitation of the operating system, the most recent version you have installed will always be used.

Recent changes to the PowerTools

If you are moving to a new version of the PowerTools after upgrading your Team Foundation Server and PowerTools from a release prior to 2012 Update 2, you’ll notice that the Backup/Restore PowerTool was uninstalled from your server during the upgrade process and that your backup plan was migrated to the new Scheduled Backups feature in the product. This means there is no longer a Backup/Restore PowerTool in the TFS 2013 PowerTools.

Customizations

If you were using an old version of the check-in policies PowerTool and plan to upgrade your Team Foundation Server and PowerTools to the 2013 version, your changeset comments, work item associations, and code analysis check-in policy should continue to work, as long as you were using a compatible version of Visual Studio (Visual Studio 2010, Visual Studio 2012 or Visual Studio 2013).

If you have any custom policies, we have a great blog post explaining how to build multi-targeting policies: https://blogs.msdn.com/b/phkelley/archive/2013/08/12/checkin-policy-multitargeting.aspx.