We are looking at ways to improve the performance of our BizTalk Server, which unfortunately is only using BizTalk Server 2004 Standard Edition.
Reading here: http://download.microsoft.com/download/e/6/f/e6fcf394-e03e-4e15-bd80-8c1c127e88e7/LicensingFAQ.doc
It States: “BTS04 STD and PAR are limited to only one processor. The BTS04 Engine is technically limited to use only one processor on the server, even if it consists of multiple processors. For deployments where the BTS04 Engine is used, you only need to buy one processor license, regardless of the number of processors on the server.”
This suggests that if we did put a second CPU in the server BizTalk would not use it and we would not have to pay for it.
My thought is that we should still expect to see some performance gain, as other processes such as IIS, COM+, and various OS processes could make use of this second CPU.
Has anyone tried this, or have more information that could prove or disprove this idea?
Thanks for any feedback you have.
Stu.
We have now carried out extensive tests using this scenario, and can report that we did see gains in performance, although not huge ones.
In our scenario, the server was often maxing out the single CPU it had, under peak load this resulted in time outs on the front end that was calling our BizTalk web services.
With the second processor addeed the BizTalk host processes defaulted to running on processor 0.
Under average load we saw that CPU 0, running the BizTalk host, was still busy but didn't max out. Under peak load CPU 0 continued to max out but we did not see the timeout issues we were getting previsouly. In the peak scenario the second CPU was running at about 50%.
This suggests that if you have a very busy BizTalk 2004 standard server you may see benefits from a second CPU.