Migration from TFS 2010 to TFS 2012

Question

I have been searching the web for a clean solution on how to migrate our 2010 tfs collections to our new tfs 2012 server, but no luck. May someone please assist with the steps or a good blog I could look at to achieve this process. The reason we want to do a MIGRATION and not an upgrade is because we got new hardware and would first like to trial TFS 2012 before we upgrade our live environment. Therefore we would like to import all our collection including the work items and build process templates.

Answer 1

Here is a decent blog post: http://mohamedradwan.wordpress.com/2013/01/05/upgrade-tfs-2010-to-tfs-2012-with-migration-to-a-new-hardware-series/

The basic steps you want to follow are:

1. Backup all of your 2010 databases.
2. Restore those databases on the SQL Server on your new hardware.
3. On your new hardware, install TFS 2012
4. When it comes time to configure. Select the upgrade option.
5. It will asks where your databases are. Select the SQL Server that you used in #2.
6. Press Go.

Note, if you want to test 2012 with the same clients you are using for 2010 then you'll need to "clone" the system otherwise your clients will get confused. To do that, see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/vstudio/ee349259.aspx