Installing and configuring BizTalk Server can be complex, time consuming and error prone. The complexity comes not from the process itself but more from all the different components and possible configurations. My objective is to share my experiences from working with several customers and some techniques you can use to create your perfect installation. The objective is not to show “the perfect” process, perfect for me might not be perfect for you. In this post I share an overview, later I will do some more with more details and share some of the functions I use.

Before you start

Decide what your main drivers are and let that be your guide through the creation. Repetition and control are generally the drivers to automate, and the goal standardized developer machines, disaster recovery preparation, test environments or ensuring the environments are equally configured over our Dev to Production pipeline.

Decide what your baseline is and document it, think what could change in 6 month or a year. With one customer we created a brilliant setup that started with bare Windows installations and within 2 hours a highly available solution was in place. Discussing a year later we concluded that creating the LUNs and volumes might have being overdoing it since the underlying storage will be changed. It would have been better to have it as a requirement in our baseline or as a distinct step in the process that could be very easily changed or replaced.

Consider internal organization and politics, i.e. if you will never be allowed to install SQL Server or create groups put it in your baseline document as a pre requisite.

Set a timeframe for your work, if not you can spend weeks searching for perfection instead of reaching your goal. If you’re too ambitious you might end up in a overly flexible process that just is a parallel to the normal one, not a good idea.

Document the execution process. Write the running order of scripts and shortly what each one does.

Windows

Generally, Windows installation is already taken care of and I see it as a part of the baseline. That said, you should ensure that the features and configurations you need are in place. You will need the Windows installation source and can use PowerShell Cmdlets like Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature or Install-WindowsFeature (will not work on Windows 10). I find this post good to find features and decide which one to use.

BizTalk Server

Setting up BizTalk Server product consists of two parts, installation and configuration. Installation will add the binaries to the system. Configuration will create or join a BizTalk Group and enable/configure other features as Rules Engine.

When running Setup.exe with the /S command it will use the list of InstalledFeature elements in the configuration file you specify. The silent installation details are documented here.

When running Configuration.exe with the /S command it will use the Feature elements. Each Feature element represents a section in the configuration dialog box. I will look more in depth on this on another post.

Installation of additional software like Adapter Pack, CU/Feature Pack, WinSCP (needed for SFTP adapter) can also be installed silently. Setting up hosts and handlers can also be done.

SQL Server

SQL Server can be silently installed and use configuration files to use the configurations you will need. I leave this with a pointer to the documentation.

Things I have scripted post installation are

• Setup of Availability Groups and creating empty BizTalk Databases with the file setup I want to have.
• Setting in the Primary Check for availability Groups
• Configuration of Backup and DTA Purge.

Wrapping up

Basically, all parts of setting up a BizTalk Server environment can be done with script. Your needs and environment set the limits. I believe scripting your environment is a good way to get to know the components you’re using. I will follow up with some more posts that will go more into hands on approach to the different parts.

I will do a session on this matter att Integrate 2019 in London https://www.biztalk360.com/integrate-2019/uk See you there!