I'm currently in the process of migrating from full fat on site Release Management to the web based version in TFS 2015. One thing I've noticed is that in the old client you can create a deployment sequence and configure actions to run in parallel, for example I might have these two steps running at the same time:
SQLServer - DeployDatabase.ps1
AppServer - DeployWebApp.ps1
In the web based version it appears the equivalent of 'Actions' (now being referred to as 'Tasks') can only be set serially. So you can see there's potentially a significant loss of time when you expand the idea of parallel tasks to multiple server roles (all performing independent steps).
For clarity, I know you can setup a task to target a group of servers, but this will limit you to only running one type of task at a time.
So my question is: Does this functionality exist? Have I missed a trick somewhere? It seems the new web based release management focuses more on the Parallel environment deployment aspect of things, forgetting the need to deploy in as fast a way as possible through each environment.
Edit: An example of what I'm describing above.
Parallel Template
You can see that I have parallel deployments occurring on different server roles withing an environment. I understand the recommendation made in the answer by Daniel Mann is to create multiple environments and trigger accordingly, the problem with adding multiple "Envs" to cater for this is that we lose all of the good things like the ability to quickly copy and manipulate environments. IE I setup a DEV environment template and copy this one "environment" to create "QA", but if I had 10 "Environments" for one true "Environment" then I'd have to manage that overhead. It feels like a large chunk of usability may have been removed in the new offering. Or am I missing the new concept?