How to: Activate a Fail-Over Application-Tier Server

If the Team Foundation system includes a warm standby for the application-tier services, you can take the primary server for the application tier offline for maintenance or to restore services quickly if a failure were to occur.

The following procedures assume that you have a working application tier acting as the primary, a standby application-tier server configured, and that the DNS Server has the Host(A) records for the following three servers.

  • **Primary   **The computer name of the primary application-tier server that has a static IP Address. For example, you might name the primary server TFS_AT_01.

  • Standby   The computer name of the standby application-tier server that has a static IP Address. For example, you might name the standby server TFS_AT_02.

  • Virtual server   The virtual server name for the application tier with the static IP Address that is the same as the IP Address the primary computer. For example, you might use the name TFS_AT for the virtual server name.

For more information, see the topic "Checklist: Standby Application-Tier Configuration" in the Team Foundation Server Installation Guide.

After a failure, the IP Address for the virtual server name must be updated manually to match the standby application-tier server.

Required Permissions

To perform this procedure, you must be a member of the Administrators security group on both the standby and primary Team Foundation application-tier server and a member of the Team Foundation Administrators security group. For more information, see Team Foundation Server Permissions.

To activate the failover application tier

  1. Verify that the standby server has matching software upgrades as the primary server.

    Note

    As the administrator, you should keep the configurations for both computers current to make that they sure are ready to provide identical services to the clients after fail-over.

  2. Use the Status command of TFSAdminUtil command-line utility to verify that the fail-over server has the same service account passwords and permissions as the primary.

  3. Ask the Domain Administrator to change the IP Address for the virtual server to match the IP address used by standby.

    For example, the following table summarizes the changes you can verify after the request is fulfilled.

    Server IP Address Before Request IP Address After Request

    Primary computer

    <IP Address 1>

    <IP Address 1>

    Standby computer

    <IP Address 2>

    <IP Address 2>

    Virtual server

    Same as primary

    Same as standby

  4. Log on to the standby server and run the ActivateAT command of the TFSAdminUtil command-line utility available in the Tools directory.

    For example,

    C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server\Tools>TfsAdminUtil ActivateAt <virtual server name>

    The utility detects the IP Address change and then restarts the Internet Information Services to make sure that the services have the current registration data.

  5. For the warning that the data-tier server you provided is being used, enter Y to continue.

  6. In Internet Explorer, verify that the Reporting Services are online by locating the reports site on the virtual server for the application tier.

    Note

    The URL for the reporting services on the virtual server TFS_AT for the application tier would be https://TFS_AT/reports.

Restoring Reporting Services for SQL Server Standard Edition

The following procedure is necessary if the application tier is using the Reporting Services for SQL Server Standard Edition. The following procedure describes using the command-line tool. You can also restore the encryption key using the Reporting Services Configuration tool.

To restore the Reporting Services

  1. On the primary application-tier computer, open a Command Prompt window and locate the RSKEYMGMT tool.

    By default, the tool is located in the binn directory. You can use the following command to change to the binn directory.

    cd %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Tools\binn

  2. Use the -l option of RSKEYMGMT tool to receive a list of the active report servers in the report server database.

    RSKEYMGMT –l

    The results for the services on an application tier named TFS_AT01 look similar to the following text.

    TFS_AT_01\MSSQLSERVER - 4a537168-75e0-46a2-acfe-813007d03d4c

  3. Note the installation GUID for the primary application-tier computer and use the -r option of the RSKEYMGMT tool to remove the instance from the database. For example, the following command is based on the results in step 2.

    RSKEYMGMT –r 4a537168-75e0-46a2-acfe-813007d03d4c

  4. Locate the installation GUID for the standby application tier and use the -a option of the RSKEYMGMT tool to add the standby to the database and restores a back-up copy of the report server encryption key and activates this instance.

    For example, the following command restores the reporting services by using

    RSKEYMGMT –a –i <instance ID for AT2> -f c:\backups\My_RSBackup_TFS_AT01 -p aPassword

  5. In Internet Explorer, verify that the Reporting Services are online by locating the reports site on the virtual server for the application tier.

    Note

    For example, the URL for the reporting services on the virtual server for the application tier would be https://TFS_AT/reports.

See Also

Tasks

Troubleshooting Team Foundation Server Fail-Over
How to: Verify Team Foundation Server Fail-Over (services)

Reference

ActivateAt Command

Concepts

Activating a Fail-Over Application-Tier Server

Other Resources

Managing Data