Interesting post on Nick Happleston’s blog entitled: Hyper-V Dramatically Lowers the Price Point for BizTalk 2009 which talks about how Microsoft’s virtualisation technology enables enterprises to deploy BizTalk in a cheaper configuration. It makes reference to Chris Romp’s blog entry BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Hyper-V Guide, but applies the same principles to BizTalk 2009.

My only issue with the cost reduction is that it revolves around the fact that BizTalk is licensed based on the number of physical processors on the box it’s running on. Based on this assumption, you can have a box running Hyper-V where you pay for 2 processors regardless of how many BizTalk boxes are deployed on it. You can therefore double or quadruple the size of your BizTalk farm without incurring additional license fees. The theory is sound, but although the BizTalk roadmap talks about the features of the new version, but doesn’t go into details on licensing implications of the new version. Also, I have one fundamental issue with it.

The question that needs to be asked is “Why are you scaling your BizTalk farm?” If you’re doing it because of performance implications, than 4 virtual BizTalk boxes aren’t going to run any quicker than 2 virtual BizTalk boxes on the same hardware. If you’re doing it because of logical groupings within your application, then you’re not using BizTalk Groups correctly (this is a feature that allows you to deploy different BizTalk applications across multiple servers). You’re certainly not doing it for resilience as you’re running on the same hardware regardless.

So, interesting post; but not quite sure I see the point.

Today, Steve Martin announced a few details about the next version of BizTalk that will be available in early 2009. The release will be BizTalk Server 2006 R3, and is an incremental release of BizTalk and not related to the future Oslo releases. In the main this is a this compatibility release to support the 2008 wave of products.(Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Visual Studio.NET 2008). Expect a CTP later in the year and full release after SQL 2008 goes gold. Additional features include:

• New web service registry capabilities with support for UDDI (Universal Description Discovery and Integration) version 3.0
• Enhanced service enablement of applications (through new and enhanced adapters for LOB applications, databases, and legacy/host systems)
• Enhanced service enablement of “edge” devices through BizTalk RFID Mobile
• Enhanced interoperability and connectivity support for B2B protocols (like SWIFT, EDI, etc)
• SOA patterns and best practices guidance to assist our customer’s implementations

Read more from Steve Martin here…

It’s always good to get a product refresh especially with a product that utilises technologies that are still evolving. Watch this space.

With the introduction of the fifth full version, BizTalk Server 2006 R2 builds upon the Business Process Management and SOA/ESB capabilities in prior releases to help organizations extend core process management technologies even further with new capabilities like native support for Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), AS2 and RFID and close alignment with the releases of 2007 Microsoft Office system and Windows Vista, including key .NET Framework technologies such as Windows Workflow Foundation and Windows Communication Foundation.

There’s lots of great stuff in there; ever since BizTalk 2004, Microsoft have introduced a new wave of services and application helping to accelerate business development and agility. It’s nice to be working in this space, but it’s very easy to forget what a step-change it is for developers to make the leap from writing applications to delivering services.

If you want to learn more about how you can leverage Microsoft technology to empower your business, check out, BizTalk for SOA and BizTalk for BPM

• BizTalk Architects group on FaceBook
• BizTalk HotRod Magazine Issue 2
• Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2
• BizTalk Labs
• Pub/Sub with low latency

Thanks Andy, loads to read there.

One interesting aspect about his post is that it highlights one of the fundamental difficulties in using a framework built by someone else. Frameworks are great because they can accelerate development, reduce testing time and provide a wealth of functionality that doesn’t need to be built from scratch. However there’s also an assumption that you will be using things in the way they have been designed, and sometimes, if it were up to you, you would have built something in a different way. I could talk about frameworks pros and cons for sometime, but this is probably best done in a different post.

In the meantime, if you work with BizTalk 2006, check out Charles’ post, there’s lots to learn.

Description: SQL Server Scheduled Job ‘Backup BizTalk Server’ (0x2CA1BE52A58C7045893DEC5F25FAAA6B) – Status: Failed – Invoked on: 2004-03-25 11:43:48 – Message: The job failed. The Job was invoked by User SA. The last step to run was step 1 (BackupFull). The job was requested to start at step 1 (BackupFull).

Which tells you that the job failed .. but finding out WHY is another matter. We started tracing through the code and figured out it was failing with an Invalid object name ‘adm_OtherBackupDatabases’ error message. Not finding a stored procedure or table with that name in BizTalkMgmtDb, I popped adm_OtherBackupDatabases term in Google and lo and behold, the first entry was an MSDN article about a known bug in BizTalk Server 2004.

Read more about it here: BUG: The “Backup BizTalk Server” SQL job fails with an error because the adm_OtherBackupDatabases table is not created