BizTalk Guides for IT Pros

The Microsoft BizTalk Server IT Professional guides are easily accessible, hands-on technical documents that provide regularly maintained, prescriptive guidance, best practices, and methodology for BizTalk customers and partners who plan, deploy, and maintain mission-critical BizTalk Server installations.

The guides are based on real-world experience from customer engagements delivered by the BizTalk Customer Advisory Team (Rangers), Premier Field Engineering, and Microsoft Consulting Services.

BizTalk Server Operations Guide
BizTalk Server Performance Optimization Guide
BizTalk Server Hyper-V Guide

Microsoft BizTalk Server Operations Guide

This guide is designed to be a valuable resource for anyone involved in the implementation and administration of a BizTalk solution, particularly IT professionals.

It is organized according to the functional aspects of planning, deploying, and managing a BizTalk Server installation. It comprises seven sections that map to the following tasks:

Evaluating operational readiness: If you are focused on assessing and evaluating the operational readiness of a BizTalk Server deployment, then start by reading the Operations Checklists and Increasing Availability for BizTalk Server sections.
Becoming operationally ready: To ensure that your BizTalk Server infrastructure and applications become operationally ready, refer to the Planning the Environment for BizTalk Server section.
Maintaining an operational environment: You will find best practices, key concepts, and procedures for maintaining an operational environment in the following sections: Increasing Availability for BizTalk Server, Optimizing Performance for BizTalk Server, Monitoring BizTalk Server, and Maintaining BizTalk Server.
Optimizing performance: To learn how to optimize the performance of your BizTalk Server environment, refer to the Optimizing Performance for BizTalk Server section.

The guide is available in several formats and from the following locations. Choose the location best suited to your role:

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Microsoft BizTalk Server Performance Optimization Guide

This document provides guidance and best practices on optimizing BizTalk Server performance for demanding production environments.

The guidance consists of the following four sections:

Getting Started: an overview of the BizTalk Server functional components that can affect performance. It also describes the phases of a BizTalk Server performance assessment.
Finding and Eliminating Bottlenecks: The Finding and Eliminating Bottlenecks section describes various types of performance bottlenecks as they relate to BizTalk Server solutions and information about how to resolve the bottlenecks.
Automating Testing: Describes how to implement an automated build process and how to automate functional and load testing using Visual Studio Team System, BizUnit, and Loadgen.
Optimizing Performance: The Optimizing Performance section provides guidance for optimizing performance of specific components in a BizTalk Server environment

The guide is available in several formats and from the following locations. Choose the location best suited to your role:

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Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Hyper-V Guide

This guide provides relevant information to IT professionals to enable them to make educated decisions about the advantages and tradeoffs of using Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V to virtualize BizTalk Server environments. This guidance was derived from a six-week performance lab conducted by the BizTalk Customer Advisory Team and Premier Field Engineering. It will be refreshed for future versions of Microsoft BizTalk Server.

The key sections of the guide are:

Getting Started: Provides conceptual information about Hyper-V, the virtualization technology introduced with Windows Server 2008, and an introduction to the Hyper-V architecture.
Deploying BizTalk Server on Hyper-V: Describes the steps that were followed to set up the lab environment, which was used to compare the performance of a BizTalk Server solution running on a Hyper-V environment to the same BizTalk Server solution running on comparable physical hardware.
Evaluating BizTalk Server Performance on Hyper-V: Details the important considerations when measuring the performance of a BizTalk Server solution running on a Hyper-V virtualized environment.
Testing BizTalk Server Performance on Hyper-V: Provides detailed results of four distinct testing scenarios that compare the performance of a BizTalk Server solution running on a Hyper-V environment to the same BizTalk Server solution running on comparable physical hardware.

The guide is available from several locations. Choose the location best suited to your role:

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