On-premises TFS Pipeline licensing

Question

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?

Answer 1

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.