I have a working TFS 2012 installation. It runs SQL Server 2008R2 and whatever version of SharePoint that comes with TFS 2012.
I would like to migrate to one of: TFS 2013 or (preferably) TFS 2015 RC. I would prefer TFS 2015 RC unless there is either a bad hurdle to migration or it is not yet safe to use by a real development team, in which case I would opt for TFS 2013.
I also need to either migrate the current VM that hosts TFS 2012 or (preferably) create a new VM to host TFS 2013/2015 RC. The current VM lives on an ESXi server that is in our office. I would like to move it to our production environment, preferably by creating a new VM and doing the necessary steps to restore the TFS database.
Finally, I would like to change the database TFS points to from itself to a more stable database server that is already in production. Its database server is 2008 R2 and I'd like to move it to our SQL Server 2012 instance.
Needless to say there are a lot of moving parts involved here, so what I'd like to know is the safest order of operations to achieve my goals, ie:
Any guidance is appreciated.
You should move to new hardware as part of the move. Setup a new box with the buys that you want, TFS 2015 (unconfigured), SQL 2014, and SharePoint 2013.
Then restore all of your old server backups to the new server. The upgrade wizard takes care of almost everything. The final part I is only for a trial run. You want clients to think that the trial is a new server so the don't follow the upgrade procedure prematurely. So once you have TFS up and running you need to call "tfsconfig setup unconfigure:all" and then run "tfssetup changeserverid" before reconfiguring as app tier only.
SharePoint is fairly easy if you follow the docs. You cant upgrade a SharePoint instance bit you can import your old site collection.