We are living exciting days, but hard to keep track of everything due to all the new features, product, versions... that are announced day by day…

Therefore, and with some delay, here is the list of new updates available for all different versions of BizTalk Server:

BizTalk Server 2010: Cumulative update package 5 for BizTalk Server 2010

Have you ever wanted to evaluate the performance of your Biztalk installation?
Evaluating your performance could be done by analyzing quite some counters in the performance monitor of Windows. Or maybe by using the Performance Analysis of Logs (PAL) Tool.

However I just found a recently released tool to benchmark your biztalk environments.
The tool is called blogical and can be found on codeplexe here.

One of the responsibilities of a BizTalk admin is to ensure that BizTalk performs according to business requirements. One of the aspects that can impact performance is hyper-threading. Hyper-threading is a technology that makes the server appear to have more processor cores than it actually has. It seems logical that more cores will give the server a better performance. However, it is not as simple as it seems. Some applications suffer from performance loss when hyper-threading is enabled. BizTalk Server is among the applications which encounter performance loss from hyper-threading. The Microsoft document “General Guidelines for Improving Operating System Performance” states that the overall performance will decrease when hyper-threading is enabled. This is because of the self-tuning algorithms within BizTalk (for more information see: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee377075.aspx).