TFS issue with lease on a hosted VM (Windows Server 2008 R2)

Hi Guys,

I have a weird use case with TFS. One of our customer run our product on a hosted virtual machine (Windows Server 2008 R2 I believe). TFS is activated with VM allowed and 3 floating licences. This is working fine.

After some time (few days) TFS will always refuse to give a lease saying that there are no more lease available (3/3). But in fact there are no lease at all (0/3). If we login on the VM with admin rights, we get a lease! But if a user on the VM asks for a lease, he gets none.

I have no clue of what is going on, especially since it works for a time then not any more. The only cure is to restart the TFS service (in the service center, the restart button) and then it works again for the users.

Is this something with the VM provider? Due to a backup? Due to a VM reload? Due to whatever else that can happen with a VM? I do not know.

Thank you for any pointers or things I could investigate next time it happens.

Best regards,Alexandre Leclerc

My guess is the customer is cloning the Virtual Machine, and one of the cloned instances with the TFS instance installed on it no longer has any leases, but the cloned instance that you logged into did have leases available. This is one of the many reasons we recommend disallowing activating TFS product keys on VMs.

The only alternative explanation is that the customer is caching the binary blob responses from the TFS instance. Which might be the case if the customer's network is misconfigured (or "properly" configured to cache multiple requests that "look" similar). A good way to test this theory is to temporarily disable caching on the network.

Thank you Wyatt for your reply.

I'll check that next time. I'm quite certain they are not cloning the machine (they know nothing about that and their VM provider would not do that - this is a very small company with 3 users max I believe).

So I'll check about the "caching" thing and if they experiment further problems I'll call their VM provider to know exactly what they are doing.

Best regards,Alexandre Leclerc

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