I have TFS on premises and i want to run few releases on different machines in parallel. I did not see any option for it in the tfs GUI. Is there an option for doing this?
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I currently manage a TFS 2018.2 TFS server for 100 users that have Visual Studio Enterprise. On our build and release resource limits tab we show that we have 103 release pipelines.
I am acquiring the management of another TFS 2018.3 server, but the users only have Visual Studio Professional. As such their release pipelines are limited to 1 pipeline.
I have read the page at: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/tfssetup/2017/11/14/understanding-build-and-release-pipelines-visual-studio-team-servicesteam-foundation-server/
From that information I believe what I am reading is that this number only affects Releases running in the TFS Release pipeline, and not build running in the build pipeline. #1 : Did I interpret this correctly?
Second, we are considering upgrading our server to Azure DevOps Server 2019. On this page: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/agents/agents?view=azure-devops-2019&tabs=browser
There is an important note stating as follows:
Starting with Azure DevOps Server 2019, you do not have to pay for self-hosted concurrent jobs in releases. You are only limited by the number of agents that you have.
Therefore, if we do upgrade to the on-premises version of TFS Server, we can run all of both builds and releases currcurrently for which we have agents installed. #2 : Can you confirm this is also correct?
I tested and confirm your interpretation for the documents in above links is correct.
With TFS, you only need pipelines for deploying releases; no pipelines are required for builds since unlimited concurrent builds are included with the TFS server license.
I tested on tfs2018 multiple build pipelines could run concurrently based on how many on-premise agents I have installed. But i can only run one release once a time.
Starting with Azure DevOps Server 2019, you do not have to pay for self-hosted concurrent jobs in releases. You are only limited by the number of agents that you have.
I also tested on vsts2109, both build and release pipeline can concurrently based on how many on-premise agents I installed.
We see that when we pause any build definition in TFS2018 and resume, Builds waiting in the queue are all running in parallel.
While this looks good to have multiple builds running parallel, it creates some problems particularly on gated definitions :
creating merge conflicts
Availability of agents for other builds
I could not find much info on internet except one on VS developer community if there is any solution or fix in future TFS update versions
Can someone provide some additional information on this behavior
Environment : TFS 2018 U2 Release environment
TFS Agent version : 2.122.1
I am testing vNext in TFS 2015. I have not found a way to trigger builds in parallel. Is that not supported in TFS?
I have found this:
http://www.jaylee.org/post/2013/03/30/Building-in-Parallel-Across-Multiple-Build-Agents-with-TFS-2012-with-Gated-Checkin.aspx
but that is old and not compatible with vNext.
To be clear I would like to be able to trigger the same build def multiple times, running each (including all its build steps) concurrently.
There's a parallel tickbox under the options tab.
There is currently no equivalent of a drag and drop parallel task. However you can spin up as many build processes as you like using PowerShell. Each of the built in tasks are just PowerShell commands and PowerShell also supports workflow tasks.
As mentioned
Build Options:MultiConfiguration here and
Build Define here
TFS2015 vNext may be only support parallel build for different platforms by different build variables
We use Jenkins as our CI build server but have moved over to TFS to do all the project management stuff (user stories, dev tasks, test cases, reporting, automation). How do I setup TFS2010 to use our Jenkins build server?
it's actually more like the other way around. You need to configure the TFS plugin for Jenkins, telling it to use TFS as your source control system. below is a link to the jenkins TFS plug-in...
https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Team+Foundation+Server+Plugin
Consider TFS 2010's ability for a Build Controller to have 1+ build agents. Since builds are a subjective topic to the team/environment, consider an environment where builds are performed on commit/check-in. Each Project Collection will have 10+ Team Projects, but perhaps only 1 or 2 are being committed to in a day.
When should a TFS administrator consider creating a new build agent?
Do multiple agents run in parallel?
When a single agent is defined to a Build Controller, does it run serially?
MSDN states: "if you set up your agents to have specialized capabilities..." . What does this mean? A technology/platform differentiator? How can you setup your agents to have specialized capabilities?
How can 'tagging' build agents be used effectively in an environment where builds are (typically) performed on each check-in.
You use multiple build agents to support multiple build machines (I work currently with a build farm with 3 build machines - and thus 3 build agents - to distribute the load).
You also might want to have multiple build agents to be able to run builds in parallel. This is a nice feature to share resources, but a requirement when you start working with Test/Lab Management features.
With the capabilities: for example you can setup a build agent with version 1 of a 3rd party component, and a second build agent with version 2. With tagging you can specify in the build definition which build agent it will choose from out of the pool of build agents.
We use 2 build agents on the same machine at work, since we only have one build machine.
The first one handles our CI builds, and is tag with CI. The build definition for the CI build is set up to only use agents that have the CI tag.
The second one is for manually queued builds, mostly for the release branch builds.
I specialized the CI build agent, because it was not uncommon when we were preparing a new build for QA to have several developers check into the development branch, which would slowing down being able to release the build to QA.
One of our builds takes 9 minutes. Its nice that you don't have to be in the Queue behind it if you happen to deploy at the wrong time.