Azure Thoughts, EAI Challenges

BPA (BizTalk Best Practice Analyzer) 1.2 is out a couple of months already. I did not think of using it on one of my sandboxes, so I tried on my Sandbox with BizTalk Server 2009 on Windows 2008 Standard Edition OS and SQL Server 2008 Developer Edition. In past I did a blog post of using BPA. First thing one must do is check for updates. After no updates where found I did a scan. Resulted in this: Some jobs have not been enabled or run. Common issues since I came across them before and can be resolved in same way. Besides these critical issues there are other less critical, but not uncommon in case of a sandbox environment. A lot of these issues listed above may apply for BizTalk production (maybe test, acceptance environments), but not for individual development environment. BPA is a valuable tool and useful in following environments: Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2; Windows Server 2008; Windows Vista Service Pack 1; Windows XP Service Pack ...

O ne of my High Performance Learning Environment post reader gave me a hint to have a look at BizTalk Best Practices Analyzer. In past I have used this tool and I forgot that it could be useful to apply on the environment I created. The BizTalk Server 2006 Best Practices Analyzer (version V1.1)performs configuration-level verification by reading and reporting only. The Best Practices Analyzer gathers data from different information sources, such as Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) classes, SQL Server databases, and registry entries. The Best Practices Analyzer uses the data to evaluate the deployment configuration. The Best Practices Analyzer does not modify any system settings, and is not a self-tuning tool. I downloaded it and gave it a spin inside my environment. It came up with some critical issues; which were resolved by enabling first of all SQL Server agent (so jobs can run) and enable jobs. Second thing was to change steps inside the job ‘Backup BizTalk Server’ because...