Andrew Babiec
Manager, Development Services
Tallan
BIZTALK SERVER 2006
HIGH AVAILABILITY, FAULT
TOLERANCE, AND SCALABILITY
Tallan Company Overview
 Founded in 1985
 Headquartered in Rocky Hill, CT
 Offices in Santa Ana, Manhattan, Tampa,
and Boston
 Over 100 technology consultants with a
wide range of expertise and knowledge
 Over 20 consultants located in the Southern
California (LA/OC) area
 Emphasis on current technology trends and
talent
Tallan Clients
Since 1985, Tallan has worked at over 400
clients, including,
 Walt Disney Internet






Group
Ingram Micro
Experian
Oakwood Worldwide
ING
Bank of America
Lincoln Financial
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Talbots
Best Buy
Ann Taylor
eBay
Barnes & Noble
CVS
Columbia House
Dell
uBid.com
Tallan Solution Areas
 Custom Application Development
 J2EE and .NET
 Web Development
 Web 2.0/Community/Social Media
 E-Commerce
 Internal System Development
 Business Intelligence (BI)
 SOA / BPM / EAI (BizTalk)
 Portals, Collaboration, and Content Management
Agenda
 High availability concepts
 BizTalk Server 2006 “Farm” demo
 BizTalk Server database disaster recovery
 Performance tips and best practices
Prerequisite Knowledge
 Microsoft® BizTalk® Server administration,
development, and deployment
 Microsoft® Windows® security
 Microsoft® SQL Server™ administration
BizTalk Server High Availability
Concepts and goals
 Fault tolerant server infrastructure
 Eliminate single points of failure
 High performance and scalability
 Avoid resource bottlenecks
 Security
 Reduce downtime due to breaches
 Backups and disaster recovery
 Recovering from catastrophic failures
BizTalk Server High Availability
Distributed Architectures
 Purpose of Distributed Architectures (“Farms”)


High availability
High performance
 “Active-Active” configuration


by virtue of use of the BizTalk MessageBox
Messages and state are persisted at predetermined
persistence points
 No Hardware affinity
 Microsoft Cluster Services support

For very specific components



MSMQ, MQ Series adapters
Enterprise SSO redundancy
BizTalk Server 2006 host process is cluster aware
Zero Availability Architecture
Single Server
High Availability Architectures
Small BizTalk Server deployment
SQL Server Cluster options
SQL Server Cluster options
High Availability Architectures
Medium-sized BizTalk Server deployment
High Availability Architectures
Large scale BizTalk Server deployment
Multiple MessageBox Databases
High Availability with SQL Clustering
Multiple MessageBox Databases
 Minimum of 3 – otherwise no benefit
 One Master messagebox
 Used for Routing
 Disable new message publication (be careful if
using MSMQT)
 Multiple secondary messageboxes
 Used for Processing
 Load Balancing is automatic and handled by
BizTalk automatically
BizTalk Server Farm Demo
 This demo assumes
familiarity with

BizTalk messaging
and orchestration
 BizTalk MSI
deployment procedures
DOMAIN: EBIS-LAB
EBILABDC1
 2 Hosts running on a laptop


1 x SQL Server node
2 x BizTalk Servers (one in a
VM)
BTS06-1
BTS06-2
SQLCLUST1
BizTalk Server Farm Demo
 Scenario will illustrate
BizTalk Server farm deployment
Publish/subscribe and architecture of the MessageBox
Hosts and host instances
Message Flow
HOST:
MySendHost
Host Instance
Host Instance
Host Instance
C:\Tutorial
\FileDrop
Send to
Endpoint
C:\Tutorial
\FileDrop
sc
ri b
Send to
Endpoint
Su
b
e
ri b
i sh
i sh
sc
Send Port
BTS2004SQL01
BTS2004SQL01
Shared File
Location
ibe
i sh
e
Pub
l
scr
ri b
Host Instance
b
Su
sc
Receive Port
b
Su
sh
MessageBox
MessageBox
Host Instance
BTS06-2
bl
Pu
bl
Pu
Receive Port
e
HOST:
MyOrchestrationHost
Su
b
BTS06-1
HOST:
MyReceiveHost
Pub
li



Host Instance
Send Port
BizTalk Server 2006 “Farm”
Providing High Availability for the
BAM Databases
 Cluster the BAM Primary Import database
and the BAM Analysis database
 Define an online window.
 Schedule DTS packages to run periodically
 Carefully choose small sets of data items
(checkpoints), and avoid including
unnecessary data items when defining an
activity
Providing High Availability for the
BAM Databases (continued)
 Understand the trade-offs between scheduled
and real-time aggregations when you design
your aggregations.
 If you choose scheduled aggregations, make
sure you schedule the cubing DTS to run more
frequently than the archiving DTS.
 Enable the BAM Event Bus Service in multiple
computers to obtain failover functionality
Behavior of BizTalk Host Instances
during SQL Server Failover
 Behavior of In-process host instances during
SQL failover
 Will be recycled until the connection to the SQL
Server is restored. Once restored, document
processing resumes normally.
 Behavior of Isolated host instances during SQL
failover
 Will pause and disable receive locations.
 Wehn databases become available, the receive
locations will be automatically enabled.
SQL Server Database Mirroring
 Not supported
 Use log shipping instead.
BizTalk Database Disaster Recovery
Steps
 Backup

Configure Scheduled Backups
 Store Backup files offsite
 Log Shipping

Configure destination (backup) SQL server
 Restore

Restore to SQL Server
 Reconfigure BizTalk Servers
 Test your restore procedures!
Troubleshooting MessageBox
Latency Issues
 The Biztalk Host instance that has the "allow




Host tracking" option set is stopped
SQL Server Agent is not running or SQL
Server Jobs are disabled
BizTalkDTADb database grows excessively
Excessive Disk I/O Latency
Retain minimal data in the BizTalkDTADb
database so that runtime performance is not
sacrificed
BizTalk Server Administration
Deployment Options
 Prescribed method: MSI Files
 Batch files and WMI scripts
 BTSTask (previously BTSDeploy)

BTSDeploy will remain supported in 2006
for forward compatibility
 3rd party and unsupported tools



NAnt (http://www.traceofthought.com)
BizTalk Assembly Checker (ships with 2006)
Community development (http://www.codeplex.com)
BizTalk Server High Availability
Best Practices
 Design Robust Infrastructures
Microsoft® SQL Server™ Cluster
 BizTalk Distributed Architecture (Farm)
 Multiple MessageBoxes for higher volumes
 Plan Hosts and host instances carefully

 Understand the BizTalk development
life cycle
BizTalk Server 2006 “applications” concept
 Allocation of BizTalk artifacts into
separate assemblies

BizTalk Server High Availability
Best Practices
 Plan and test your disaster recovery strategy
 Backing up your BizTalk Databases
 BizTalk Log Shipping
 Archiving and Purging Document Tracking DB
 Documentation
 Hardware Architecture
 Server Operations
 Implemented Solution Architectures
 Deployment procedures
Session Summary
 Role of the administrator
 High availability concepts
 BizTalk Server 2006 “Farms” – Scale Out!
 BizTalk Server Data DR – Test restores
 Best practices and recommendations
For More Information
 Read



http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/en/us/white-papers.aspx
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/biztalk/default.aspx
BizTalk Documentation (Help File)
 Learn

http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/techinfo/virtual-labs.mspx
 Blogs and Newsgroups



http://www.blogbiztalk.com/
http://blogs.msdn.com/biztalk_server_team_blog/
http://blogs.msdn.com/Biztalk_Core_Engine
 Community Developed Tools

http://www.codeplex.com/ (search for “BizTalk”)
Contact Information
Tallan
Microsoft Gold Certified Partner
Andrew Babiec
Manager, Development Services
Tallan
ababiec@tallan.com
Q&A
Thank You