BizTalk Community series: Introducing Rajasekhar.R

A few weeks back I posted a story on the TechNet Wiki blog regarding the increasing number of BizTalk community members contributing to the TechNet Wiki. One of them is Rajasekhar.R, who is a young BizTalk talent from India. So today's story is on him.

 

Rajasekhar.R  is 21 Years Old, and lives in Coimbatore(TamilNadu - South India), which has a beautiful climate all over the year and is located near OOTY (Queen of the Hills).

He has completed his B.Tech Information Technology (UG) June'11 and started his career in the Technology BizTalk server as a IT Analyst at Cameron Manufacturing India Pvt Ltd since Aug'2011.

 

At Cameron Rajasekhar has had the opportunity to work on the entire BizTalk Application Life Cycle; from designing the technical specifications to supporting the application. He has gained experience in installing and configuring the BizTalk server, where he has faced his first challenges. He learned a lot from that first experience.

From that point on he developed complex live financial data processing applications that integrated with SAP, and .Net web services. Finally he learned about deployment of applications and supporting them. He is basically an all-round BizTalk professional now like many of us.

 

Rajasekhar's experience with BizTalk and I quote:
 

"BizTalk Server, it is really a wonderful product by Microsoft and I love to work with it. I have gained a lot of experience working in BizTalk and I got the chance to grasp some knowledge in other technologies like SAP, Web services, and so on."

 

and on his learning experience:

 

"I am a type of person, where I like to fail, because when I fail I have a opportunity to get experienced and expertise in that thing ( which suits for our entire life) FAIL Stands for First Attempt In Learning."

 

Rajasekhar in his spare time likes to chat with his friends, browse social networks and play chess and tennis. He likes to watch Cricket and his favorite team is INDIA, and favorite player is Adam Gilchrist (Australia).

  

I like to thank for his contributions and his time.

BizTalk Virtual Machine in Windows Azure using Quick Create–Part II

In my previous post I discussed ways to setup a BizTalk Server 2010 R2 CTP Virtual Machine in Azure. The post demonstrates how a VM with the BizTalk Server 2010 R2 is provisioned using CREATE CREATE. However the BizTalk Server 2010 R2 is installed on the VM, but not yet configured!



Ergo you have to do that yourself!

This is pointed out in Getting started with BizTalk Server 2010 R2 CTP in Windows Azure Virtual Machines post by BizTalk Server Team. However, it explains to do a basic configuration, while I choose to do a custom configuration of the all the features.

Note: On first logon, a few start up tasks will be executed. Wait until the SQL Server – Getting Started link is created on desktop.

The configuration is the same as for BizTalk Server 2010 setting up SSO, Group, Runtime and so on. Some of the other BizTalk components like adapter pack are not installed on this Virtual Machine either. This explains presence of the BizTalk Server 2010 R2 CTP folder and SQLServer_11.0_Full folders with the install bits.



For configuration of BizTalk I used the administrator account that I use to login to the machine. I configured all the features, yet I can image one not configuring all the features.



The feature I did not configure was BAM Alerts, which was greyed out and not possible. To use that feature you will need to have the prerequisites for BAM Alerts installed. To check the configuration I started the BizTalk Administration Console and look at the adapters.



There all installed and configured. Notice the new ones like:

• WCF-WebHttp adapter, to consume REST service or expose REST service
• SB-Messaging adapter, for sending/pulling data from Service Bus Queues/Topics
• WCF-NetTCPRelay adapter, for hosting relays or sending data to NetTCPRelay end points
• WCF-BasicHttpRelay adapter, for hosting relays or sending data to BasicHttpRelay end points

The adapters are not the only new feature, see the post Announcing Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010 R2 CTP Release! from BizTalk Server Team for the other.

The Virtual Machine in Azure I have now is ready for some experimenting, developing and testing of BizTalk Server 2010 R2 CTP.

BizTalk Community series: Introducing Sandro Pereira

One of the benefits of my job and role as MVP is that I have the opportunity to meet a lot of BizTalk community members, MVP’s and Microsoft professionals around the world. Some of them became good friends. One of them is Sandro Pereira, who I met for the first time during MVP summit beginning 2011. He is very active in the community through for instance blogs, forums, and the TechNet Wiki. Many of you will probably recognize him through on of his contributions.

Sandro Pereira is 34 years old and lives in Crestuma, a small village in the beautiful region of Oporto in Portugal (known worldwide for its wine: Port wine and also classified as World Heritage by UNESCO). At end of this year he will begin a life together with his beautiful girlfriend Lígia, a big support in his life.

Sandro started his professional career as a Java, C++ and C# developer and then as a Web project manager. In 2005 he decided it was time to accept a new challenge and joined DevScope as BizTalk consultant. Currently he is also as Project Manager with focus on systems integration using BizTalk Server and Windows Azure Service Bus. DevScope is a company specializing in business intelligence solutions, systems integration, CRM and collaborative portals based on Microsoft technology and predominantly active in the industrial, financial and public sector.

Portugal is a small country with a small community of specializing technicians in BizTalk, this allows Sandro to have the versatility to perform a bit of all BizTalk roles:

• as a BizTalk Architect he advises his clients about BizTalk infrastructure environments and design integration solutions;
• as a BizTalk Developer he implements integration scenarios (EIA, B2B and BPM);
• and often as BizTalk Administrator he performs BizTalk administration and audit environments, depending on the client in question.

Personally I consider myself more as BizTalk Architect and BizTalk Developer probably less, but I'll always play the role of developer, because I love it!

Sandro has like many other BizTalk community members I interviewed before has an opinion/view on the product:

Like all products, BizTalk Server has its advantages and disadvantages; there are those who love the product and those who simply hates; BizTalk Server is one of the most mature and stable products from Microsoft and in my personal opinion is one of the best platforms that I know to work in integration scenarios (EIA, B2B and BPM). Of course, these platform, can still be improved and continue to grow, this is what is expected with the planned launch of the new version BizTalk Server 2010 R2.

Some of his friends say Sandro is a workaholic (or Bizaholic :)) because one of the activities he loves doing in his spare time is to write technical articles about BizTalk. He writes for his blog and contributes to a number of communities as he is member of:

• BizTalk Brazil Community;
• BiztalkAdminsBlogging;
• NetPonto community;
• editor of the magazine “Programar”;
• member and moderator on the MSDN BizTalk Server Forums, TechNet Wiki and Code Gallery contributor and CodePlex contributor

Seem like too much work but I couldn't disagree more, I just don’t consider this work, this is simply a hobby that I enjoy do it. Besides being a healthy hobby, that helps me improve day after day and it has allowed me to be awarded, since 2011, Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for BizTalk Server, travel and have the pleasure to meet excellent technicians worldwide.

To BizTalk community Sandro would like to say the following:  I would like to thank all and also leave a challenge: not to restrict themselves only to consume information but also to start sharing the knowledge they have, I'm sure that they will bring additional value to the community.

Beside being a Bizaholic Sandro loves spending time with my family, going out at night for a drink with his friends, going to the cinema, traveling with his girlfriend and play a variety of sports. He is active in snowboarding, snooker, karting, biking, soccer, but his favorite is futsal (indoor soccer).

The only sport I like to watch is soccer, and to specify in more detail, only the matches of best team in the world: Futebol Clube do Porto.

I would like to thank Sandro for his contributions and time for this interview. He is a great inspiration to many, one of the most productive community members and above all a good friend.

BizTalk Virtual Machine in Windows Azure using Quick Create

Fellow BizTalk MVP Stephen W. Thomas has created two excellent posts on setting up a BizTalk Server 2010 CTP in Azure:

• Setting Up BizTalk 2010 R2 CTP in an Azure Virtual Machine using the Gallery
• Running a Windows Azure Virtual Machine Locally with Hyper-V or VMware 8 / VMware 9

In this post I like to share my experience and do a follow up on my post BizTalk IaaS solution: Provisioning Developer Environment. Now I have an Azure subscription through my MSDN account, yet you can setup a trail subscription (see Stephen’s post) or have a paid subscription. Look at the pricing page to see the options for yourself and choose what is best fit in case you do not have an MSDN account. MSDN provides some benefits when it comes to Windows Azure.
With any subscription you can log into the portal. You can then on left hand side choose virtual machines. You can then select CREATE A VIRTUAL MACHINE.




You will then see a dialog appear as below.



You can choose to use QUICK CREATE of FROM GALLERY. The latter is described in post by Stephen. With the QUICK CREATE you need to:

• DNS Name that is available;
• Choose Image in this case the Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010 R2 CTP;
• Password
• Size (Small, Medium, Large, or Extra Large)
• Location (West US, East US, East Asia, South East Asia, North Europe, or West Europe)

After entering the required settings you can click CREATE VIRTUAL MACHINE.



Now you will see that the VM is being provisioned.This may take a few minutes. During that time you will notice that the status will change from starting to stopped, to running (provisioning) to Running. While provisioning you can click on name of VM being created and you will see a new page appear with details of the machine.


When ‘Running’ status is reached you can connect to machine through Remote Desktop. You will see CONNECT in bar below being enabled. When you click CONNECT a dialog will pop up like below asking for security credentials.



Enter the password you presented earlier on during QUICK CREATE and click OK. Then the following dialog will appear.



You can click View certificate..



You can Install Certificate… to install in your Certificate Store on your machine to enable trust. Then click OK and Yes. You will now enter your Virtual Machine in the Azure that contains the BizTalk Server 2010 R2 CTP and all required other software (i.e. SQL Server 2012, Visual Studio 2012, and so on).



Now you have your BizTalk Virtual Machine in the cloud. The Virtual Machine was sized as MEDIUM meaning dual core processor and 3.5 Gb of Memory.



It has C Drive of 50 Gb and D Drive (Temporary Storage) of 134 Gb. The D: drive is available to your application, but you should very careful about using it for storage. It is actually the physical storage on the rack server the VM is running on. It is NOT backed by Windows Azure storage and should be considered temporary storage only. One great use for it is the OS paging file which contains data that does not need to be persistent (this is the default behavior in Windows Azure). Source: Micheal Washam Windows Azure Virtual Machines.



You can see that 4 Gb is used and that is the paging file. To summarize you have a virtual machine ready to use that is up and running in Windows Azure. Cool, however there are costs involved. With the  MSDN Subscription, you get some benefits like you see below




If you exceed any of these than you will have to pay a certain amount, which will be indicated on the account page.



From time to time you may need to watch your account to see your usage and if you are incurring any costs.With a virtual machine you will incur costs for having it hosted up in Azure, when it is running or not. To stop incurring cost you have to delete the virtual machine entirely and delete the corresponding storage (i.e. VHD containing the provisioned BizTalk Server 2010 R2 CTP). Before deleting the VHD you can decide to download it to your local drive. This is well detailed and discussed in Running a Windows Azure Virtual Machine Locally with Hyper-V or VMware 8 / VMware 9 post by Stephen W. Thomas.

My take on this is that creating VM through either QUICK CREATE or FROM GALLERY is a straight forward task. You will find enough background material around Virtual Machines in the mentioned posts by Stephen, my post back in June, Michael Wasman’s post and MSDN resources. When you want to start using Virtual Machines for BizTalk I recommend studying all there resources carefully and take all the hints/tips and warnings at heart as it can save you some headache and money.

The final release of BizTalk Server 2010 R2 will become available probably early next year, so you have time to prepare yourself with this IAAS feature. Nothing is yet known on pricing/licensing of BizTalk Server 2010 R2 on-premise of in Windows Azure. This will probably be clear when the BizTalk Server 2010 R2 is released in RTM.

BizTalk360 continues to evolve: The fifth release in Beta

Monitoring is essential to keep your BizTalk environments healthy and running smoothly. With monitoring you have a couple of options. Either using System Center Operation Manager, a combination of SCOM and third party tooling or solely use third party tooling.

1. Monitoring the BizTalk environment with SCOM can be done with using the management pack for BizTalk Server or AVIcode .NET Application Management Pack.

2. An alternative monitoring solution is BizTalk360, which you can combine with using SCOM. This means you can have best of both worlds.

3. In case your enterprise does not have SCOM or is planning to deploy SCOM, BizTalk360 itself can be an excellent choice for monitoring BizTalk environments.

To efficiently monitor a BizTalk environment people with different roles are involved like:

· System Administrator,

· Database Administrator and   

· BizTalk Administrator.

Each has different needs for information to be able to resolve or prevent issues. BizTalk360 can aid in full filling the needs for a BizTalk administrator as it will give him/her the fine grained detail of the environment and in-depth information. Besides that it has many capabilities onboard that SCOM lacks. For instance fine grained governance, throttling analyzer, Message Box Viewer Reports and Graphical Message View. The productivity of a BizTalk administrator can be dramatically enhanced using BizTalk360. BizTalk360 is provided by Kovia ltd and about to release the fifth release. The new capabilities are:

• Monitoring Dashboard  

• Backup – Disaster Recovery configuration visualizer   

• Process monitoring for receive locations and send ports (aka silence/inactivity monitoring)   

• HP Operation Manager Integration   

• Support for Message Box Viewer (MBV) 12   

• Run MBV anytime directly from UI  

• New Event Viewer notification channel • Disable individual alerts

Performance Improvements

• Better applications loading time   

• Improved Environment/Platform setting dashboard loading time  

• Improved monitoring service performance

The new capabilities and improvements represent another cycle of evolution this product is going under. Which means that it continues to grow to a fully-fledged product with an outstanding set of capabilities for monitoring your BizTalk environment. BizTalk360 supports BizTalk versions 2006 and up. You can download the BizTalk360 version 5 Beta now and try it yourself on your local or test BizTalk environment.