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We often get this question asked what’s are the restrictions of BizTalk Server Standard edition. I thought of highlighting the key restrictions that are applicable to BizTalk Server Standard Edition here.

highlighting the key restrictions that are applicable to BizTalk Server Standard Edition

BizTalk Applications Limit:

You cannot deploy more than 5 BizTalk Applications in a single environment (this excludes the default BizTalk.System application). This is not a great restriction since BizTalk applications are just logical containers to group artifacts together (receive locations, send ports, schemas, orchestrations, policies etc). There is nothing stopping a customer from deploying all the artifacts inside one or two applications. In fact, this restriction results in some of the bad practices in BizTalk Application deployment. In our opinion, a better restriction will be restricting the number of artifacts like “x” number of orchestrations, send ports, receive locations.

BizTalk Servers Limits:

You cannot have more than one server in a BizTalk Environment. This is the one that forces most of the customers to move to BizTalk Server Enterprise edition. This restriction basically results in not having high availability for your BizTalk environment, if the server goes down, your environment is down.

Single Message Box:

You cannot have more than one MessageBox in your environment. Scaling MessageBox is required when you have a high throughput scenario. It’s not really big impact in BizTalk Standard Edition case since you are restricted to only one BizTalk server and hence you can only handle so much load anyway.

Number of CPU cores:

You cannot have more than 8 cores on the server. Again this restricts the scalability of your BizTalk Environment to limited processing power.

In a nutshell, the BizTalk Standard edition is designed for customers who want to take advantage of the integration platform but not concerned with scalability and high throughput.

Author: Saravana Kumar

Saravana Kumar is the Founder and CTO of BizTalk360, an enterprise software that acts as an all-in-one solution for better administration, operation, support and monitoring of Microsoft BizTalk Server environments. View all posts by Saravana Kumar