In the last chapter we learned about problem determination, event sources and files. In this chapter we will learn about connectivity and networking.  Since connectivity and networking is such a broad subject, we will only discuss a few essential topics.  

The following topics will be discussed:

In the last two chapters we went through the main tools and procedures that we can use to be up to date about how our environments are behaving. A system administrator is in a better position to react against a potential outage when has all the information possible about the issue as soon as it happens. But yet having all the information at hand, we will still have to separate the wheat from the chaff, and find the root cause of the problem before being able to come up with the right fix.

All SQL Server Network Protocols are installed by SQL Server Setup, but may or may not be enabled. And you need to be aware that this protocols can have impact in your BizTalk Environment, for example:

• Under certain stress conditions (such as clients accessing SQL Server from the same computer), the SQL Server Shared Memory protocol may lower BizTalk Server performance.
• BizTalk Server loses connectivity with a remote SQL Server computer that houses the BizTalk Server databases and this may happen if the necessary protocols for SQL Server are not enabled.

In the third chapter we learned about System Center Operation Manager R2 (SCOM) and seen some scenario’s. SCOM is a great product for monitoring your entire enterprise infrastructure. Yet it may be overkill to use SCOM for just monitoring a BizTalk group itself. Or when you do not intend to use an enterprise monitoring system like SCOM for monitoring BizTalk you may have look for alternatives.  

The goal in this chapter is to focus on third party monitoring tools and products available in market and through the community (CodePlex).

You can download the pdf below or by clicking here.

When you look at Microsoft’s documentation about restoring your BizTalk databases they always talk about restoring your databases by using log shipping. Most of my client have various reasons (unfamiliarity with the technique, requires extra servers and licenses, etc.) for not wanting to use log shipping. Alternatively you can manually restore the BizTalk databases.

My concern with manually restoring the databases is that it can take a lot of time and is prone to errors. By default the Backup BizTalk Server job creates a full backup once a day and a log backup every 15 minutes. Worst case scenario you will have to restore one full backup and (24 * 4) 96 logs times at least 5 databases. That means you will have to do 485 restore actions to restore the BizTalk databases to the latest state!

In the first chapter we learned about Backing Up and restoring our BizTalk Server 2010 environments. In chapter 2 (written by Andres Del Rio Benito and myself) we will untangle the complexity of implementing High Availability. The prime goal of high availability is to minimize downtime.

In order to achieve high availability for our BizTalk Environment we will learn about the following topics.

• High Availability and the Microsoft Operations Framework
• Host separation and multiple host instances
• High availability setup of BizTalk both virtual and physical setup
• Setup of handlers in a high available environment
• Third-party clustering and virtualization platform

You can download the pdf below or by clicking here.

The first chapter has been written by Howard Edidin and myself. It is all about Backup and Recovery. A good backup and recovery strategy is key to keep essential data safe and recover quickly after a disaster. The chapter has the following goals.

• We will discover that Backup and Recovery is a Team effort.
• We will learn about the steps involved to create a proper Backup Plan.
• We will learn about the types of Backup Storage available.
• We will discover open-source tools that will help you implement your backups.
• We will learn how to recover from a Disaster.
• We will walk-thru actual Backup and Restore scenarios provided by some of your peers.

You can download the pdf below or by clicking here.

For quite some time now Andres Del Rio Benito, Howard Edidin and Steef-Jan Wiggers have been working on a book called Microsoft BizTalk 2010 Administration Essentials. This book is about (you guessed it) BizTalk administration. It talks about all relevant topics that every BizTalk admin should be concerned with. After some rounds of technical reviews done by Ben Cline, Sandro Pereira and myself the book is now ready to be published.

I am very happy to announce that the writers choose BizTalkAdminsBlogging.com as a platform to publish their book. We will be releasing a new chapter every two or three weeks.

Microsoft has released the beta of BizTalk Server 2013. This means that the initial name BizTalk 2010 R2 has been changed. You can download the beta here:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=35553

This new release contains some new features:

One of the principal needs for BizTalk Administrators is the ability to monitor the health of BizTalk environments and react promptly to possible problems, you can accomplished this by using certain tools such as: BizTalk Administration Console; BizTalk360; SCOM and many more… However, unfortunately many times, some of these tools are not available for us but we still need to accomplish this task.

In my last post I demonstrated how we could use PowerShell to monitor disk space. In this post I will explain how you can be able to monitoring SQL Agent Jobs in your BizTalk environment using PowerShell.