Real World Migration Story from BizTalk 2006/2006R2 to BizTalk 2010

The BizTalk Server infrastructure used by Microsoft IT (MSIT) included BizTalk Server 2006 R2 and BizTalk Server 2006 environments. Until recently, the platforms that hosted these applications were not Disaster Recovery enabled. Since BizTalk Server 2006 doesn't support the Applicability Statement 2 (AS2) protocol, AS2 transactions are sent to BizTalk Server 2006 R2. Then, the transactions are routed back to BizTalk Server 2006 for further processing. As a result, there are many cross-server dependencies. With the transactions passed through multiple BizTalk servers, the architecture of these applications was complex. The integration team wanted to remove these cross-server dependencies and simplify the application architecture.

Supported Operating Systems

Windows 7, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Vista

To simplify the architecture, the BizTalk Server 2006 R2/2006 environments are migrated to BizTalk Server 2010. The objectives of the migration are:

• Enable Disaster Recovery for business critical applications.
• Reduce the number of servers required to deploy the applications and reduce the support costs for the servers.
• Minimize the number of pipelines deployed by leveraging the Pipeline Consolidation Framework of BizTalk Server 2010.
• Enable MSIT to support a broader range of internal applications.
• Stay current with the technologies: Windows Server 2008 R2, SQL Server 2008 R2, Visual Studio 2010, and the .NET Framework 4.

The migration to BizTalk Server 2010 is a great success, including the following results:

• Reduced the physical servers for 32 applications from 51 servers to 22 servers
• Uptime is greater than 99.9% and about 400,000 messages are processed per week
• Utilize the benefits of Hyper-V
• Zero major issues post-production

This white paper discusses the steps taken to migrate to BizTalk Server 2010.