In the last blog post, we analyzed the report capabilities of BizTalk NoS Ultimate – Reflector and Refactor. Today, we will continue to analyze the list of available features present in this Visual Studio extension, focusing on the daily BizTalk Developer’s improved tasks.
These are, what I call, simple tasks that will improve the BizTalk developer experience which will reduce the development and deployment time in new or existent BizTalk projects.
Build Project
You are probably thinking, why do I need another Build option? The reason is simple: sometimes we have a huge solution with several projects inside, and in these situations trying to build one simple project with the out-of-the-box Visual Studio option can be a challenge. It will take a huge amount of time trying to build the project because of all of the dependencies.
The option in NoS will build the desired project without any interaction with the Visual Studio design environment, making this operation faster than the native build operation in Visual Studio.
You can access these features by:
Right-click on your project name, expand BizTalk NoS and select the Build project option
Fast Register/Unregister in GAC
How many times have you desired to have a simple easy and quick way to install a DLL, and (why not) also uninstall, in the Global Assembly Cache (GAC), and why not directly from your favourite developer tool: Visual Studio? Instead, we need to install DLL’s using the Gacutil.exe tool, and don’t get me wrong, it is an excellent tool, but it is not practical in the day-by-day work!
Finally, now you have this option!
You can access these features by:
Select your project name, expand BizTalk NoS and select the Register in GAC or Unregister from GAC option
Note: This works with all DLL’s, it doesn’t have to be a BizTalk DLL, you can easily register a C# Helper Class used by BizTalk Projects into the GAC with this functionality.
Deploy Assembly
Again you are probably thinking, why do I need another Deploy option? And the reasons are exactly the same as the Build project option which we described earlier.
This operation will deploy a single BizTalk assembly directly from the Visual Studio without trying to deploy also all of its BizTalk Server project dependencies.
You can access these features by:
Select your project name, expand BizTalk NoS and select the Deploy assemblyoption
The equivalent we have to this feature is the add/update resources from the BizTalk Server administration console.
What’s the purpose of this feature? In some situations, you just simply don’t want to use the Visual Studio out-of-the-box functionality, as it will deploy all the dependencies and other stuff which will take a huge amount of time. What we want sometimes is only to deploy one specific assembly easily and fast.
This option will allow you to make this directly from Visual Studio, making this operation faster than the native deploy operation on Visual Studio.
Do you feel difficult to keep up to date on all the frequent updates and announcements in the Microsoft Integration platform and Azure iPaaS?
Integration weekly update can be your solution. It’s a weekly update on the topics related to Integration – enterprise integration, robust & scalable messaging capabilities and Citizen Integration capabilities empowered by Microsoft platform to deliver value to the business.
This blog is an extraction of the session “BizTalk360 – The past, the present, and the future” presented by the CEO of Kovai.co, Saravana Kumar at Integrate 2020.
This blog gives an overview of how BizTalk360 started and how the challenges have been enhanced and what will be future of BizTalk360.
About Saravana
He is a hard-core technical person and Microsoft MVP since 2007. As he was working in the BizTalk Server integration space for a decade. He found himself challenging to while work with BizTalk Server projects to manage and monitor the applications and other components. Hence the birth of BizTalk360.
The origin story of BizTalk360
BizTalk360 was founded in 2011. It’s almost 10 years now. Saravana started this as a hobby project, an idea evolved in one of the MVP summit in 2010. The birth of BizTalk360 started and from there, and now it is an essential tool for enterprises that uses Microsoft BizTalk Server.BizTalk360 is completely a web-based admin console that provides a solution to Operations, Monitoring, and Analytics your BizTalk Server environment.
Interesting topics Covered
BizTalk360 – 10 years Journey (Past)
New Features (Present)
What’s next? BizTalk360 – v10 (Future)What is BizTalk360?
The business that uses BizTalk Server usually relies on standard admin console to manage their day to day activities but that won’t sufficient to do complete operational, Monitoring, and Analytical activities. Other third-party solutions like SCOM and custom development solutions are not matured enough to fill the gaps in BizTalk Server. Moreover, in an analytics perspective, BizTalk admins doesn’t have any clue about what is happening in the system? Our tool BizTalk360 is a single operational, Monitoring, and Analytics for the Microsoft BizTalk Server.
A single tool to improve your productivityBizTalk360 addresses some of the key features. Consider if you don’t have a BizTalk360 environment and the way you manage the BizTalk server environment is by using at least seven of the below productivity tools. Such as
BizTalk admin Console
SQL Management Studio
Event viewer
Performance Monitor
BAM portal
ESB Portal
BizTalk Health Monitor
Monitoring Consoles
Dashboard
The main challenge in the admin console is that there is not an efficient way to get an overview of their BizTalk server environment status. Whereas in BizTalk360, a customized dashboard is available in order to view the overall health of your BizTalk Server in a single view In this way, you can bring in your business people to support your BizTalk environments.
Event Viewer
When it comes to troubleshooting operational problems in the BizTalk Server, the first-place admins/support person will look is the admin console. If they can’t find anything obvious, their next point of search is the Event Viewer. To address these challenges, “Advanced Event Viewer“ came into existence where all the events from all the BizTalk/ SQL server are stored in a central database.
Performance Tools
BizTalk360 aims to offer an out of box tool with similar capabilities as the Performance Monitor tool in Windows servers. Analytics offers a visual display of the most important performance counters in a consolidated way and arranged on a single screen so that the information can be monitored in a glance.
Business Activity Monitoring (BAM)
BizTalk360 comes with an integrated BAM portal that allows the business users to query BAM views, perform activity search, view the user permissions, and the activities time window.
ESB exception management framework
Even though the Exception management framework itself is a stable offering and fully supported by Microsoft still it is missing some important capabilities like
Bulk Edit/Resubmit – It is very important since when there is a failure you will typically have 10’s-100’s of failed messages for the same reason.
Auditing – There is no ability to trace all the activities like edit, resubmit actions.
To address all those challenges as highlighted
Our tool provides a rich ESB exception dashboard with a full search/filter/display of exception details.
BizTalk Health Monitor
BHM is a tool that can be used to analyze and fix issues in the BizTalk server environment. The predecessor of the BHM tool, Message Box Viewer (MBV), was initially built as a hobby project by one of the Microsoft Support Persons.
User Access Policy
On the left-hand side of the image is the standard admin console. Basically standard admin console doesn’t provide any access/security. There is no restriction on users. Once the user gets control of the BizTalk admin console. Users will be able to view the entire admin console.
In the shown example,
Tom is our BizTalk360 admin who has all access to all the integrations in the BizTalk server but John from HR and Claire from finance altogether from different teams. They must not be provided with the same permission as Tom.
This sort of application isolation security has been provided in BizTalk360.
Governance and Audit
The standard BizTalk server Admin console doesn’t come with any in-built auditing capabilities for user activities. Once someone has access to BizTalk Admin Console that is, pretty much entire BizTalk support team, they are free to perform any activities without a traceIn the BizTalk server, if any of the host instances is in stop state or if any of the host instances goes down, such activity has not been traced. In BizTalk360, the auditing section comes as an in-built tool to trace what’s been done in the BizTalk server console.
Advanced Tooling
Some of the advanced tools that have been developed in BizTalk360 in the past 10 years.
Throttling Analyser
EDI Manager
Graphical Message Flow
Backup/DR visualizer
ESB manager
BAM Portal
Rules Composer
Tracking Manager
Throttling analyzer
The idea behind the BizTalk360 throttling analyzer is to simplify the complexity in understanding the BizTalk throttling mechanism and provide a simple dashboard view. This helps people to understand the throttling conditions in their BizTalk environment, even when they do not have very deep technical expertise
Graphical Message Flow
In standard admin console, it is time-consuming as everything is stored in a flat-file format. Especially, if you got a more complex, very loosely coupled system the challenges get worse diagnosing/understanding the message flow. And another disadvantage is, when somebody has access to the tracking queries, confidential information might be revealed to unauthorized people.
In BizTalk360, it assists to visualize the entire message flow in a single view where it encapsulates
All service instances
Send port
Orchestration
Receive port details
Rules Composer
For example, if users want to roll out rule dynamically on Christmas, users need to seek help from development and this can be time consuming process as well. BRE is a simplified tool that will empower business user to manage business rules in a complex business process
Monitoring
Another key capability of BizTalk360 is Monitoring. The tool provides extensive monitoring which ensure your health of the BizTalk server environment. BizTalk being a middleware, it is always connected to various systems, we make sure that all the connected systems are in a healthy state.IBizTalk360 comes with integrated systems like
SQL
MSMQ
IBMMQ
Web End Points
Azure Service Bus
Web Jobs
SFTP locations
Disks
We are super proud to convey that no other product provides a complete monitoring tool for the BizTalk server.
Over 20 years of experience in field and that has been covered in Monitoring which meets up the customer requirements.
On a confident note, there is no other product in the market which serves 100% BizTalk Server monitoring.
Biztalk360 can be integrated with your current Enterprise Monitoring Stack
Service now
AppDynamics
Dynatrace
New Relic
BizTalk360- 10 years of innovationFor the last 9 years, consistently there will be 4-5 releases happening every year. For more information regarding release taken in every year.
Consistently, we are filling in the gaps Microsoft has left for the global BizTalk server Customers.
To align with the latest migration of Biztalk application in the cloud, the same has been brought in BizTalk360.
BizTalk360 has become the de-facto tool for BizTalk server customers. Used by over 600 large enterprises including Microsoft.
The Future
One of the biggest change its been take up is rewriting the entire UI in a new way. Backend API are pretty solid, but front end its initially started with silver light. In the upcoming years, UI will be complete change to Angular 8
Currently, the development team is working on the up-gradation of UI in BizTalk360.
Continued Innovation
The above mentioned is the user forum and based on the customer’s feedback, if it is appropriate it’s been added to the product for every release.
Wrap Up
In this blog post, we discussed, what is the past, present, and future of BizTalk360. Still, there are lots of announcements and feature enhancements that are yet to come. Stay tuned for further updates. Happy Learning!
This blog is a transcript of the session “RPA in Enterprise Integration” presented by Kent Weare, Microsoft Power CAT PM Lead – RPA & BOTS at Integrate 2020.
In this session, Kent will introduce the new service and then demo many different scenarios where RPA can be used in the enterprise.
Agenda
What is a Bot?
Bots and the Power Platform
What is RPA and Why Should I care?
Demo
Call to Action
What is a Bot?
A bot is a software application that is programming to do certain tasks. Bots are automated, which means they run according to their instructions without a human user needing to start them up. Bots often imitate or replace a human user’s behaviour. Typically, they do repetitive takes, and they can do them much faster than human users could.
Next, Kent discussed about two kinds of Bots. They are Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Bot and another one is Conversational Chat Bots.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is typically used to perform time-consuming tasks on legacy platforms where integration is not possible or expensive. This tool help organisations accelerate their digital transformation projects without having to replace legacy systems or develop expensive integration solutions.
Conversational bots allow users to interact with your web service through text, interactive cards, and task modules. Example of Chat Bots like Facebook messenger, web chat, WeChat etc. Conversational bots can be scoped to handling a few simple commands or complex, artificial-intelligence-powered and natural-language-processing virtual assistants.
Microsoft Power Platform
The ‘Power Platform’ is a collective term for four Microsoft products: Power BI, PowerApps, Power Automate (previously known as Flow) and Power Virtual Agents.
Power BI
Make informed, confident business decisions by putting data-driven insights into everyone’s hands.
Power Apps
Turn ideas into organizational solutions by enabling everyone to build custom apps that solve business challenges.
Power Virtual Agents
Easily build chatbots to engage conversationally with your customers and employees—no coding required.
Power Automate
Microsoft recently released a new service in Power Automate (formerly known as Microsoft Flow) that provides makers with Robotic Process Automation (RPA) capabilities. RPA can be used to integrate legacy applications like web and desktop applications into modern automation solutions
Demo – Hello world Power Automate – UI Flow
Step 1: Log on to flow.microsoft.com
Step 2: Select My flows > UI flows > New.
Step 3: Select Web app > Next
Step 4: Enter a name for your UI flow into the Flow name field.
Step 5: Enter the URL for the Website you want to automate into the Base URL field, and then select Launch recorder. The Selenium IDE launches.
Step 6: In Selenium IDE, select the red REC button in the top right side of the screen to launch the recorder. The URL you chose in the previous step opens.
Step 7: Perform the actions that you want to record on the website.
Step 8: When you are finished recording, select on the red Stop button in the top right corner of the Selenium IDE.
Step 9: Select the Run current test button from the top left side of the screen to see the UI flow you just created run.
Step 10: Select the Save project button in the top right of the Selenium IDE. This close, and then uploads the project.
Time Sheet Scenario
In this scenario is that we have a legacy timesheet application that requires us to be on the corporate intranet in order to fill in our timesheet. But, since we have UI Flows available to us, we can just provide our time entry details to the bot and UI Flows will take care of inputting that information into our timesheet application.
Our architecture includes creating a flow that exposes an HTTP Trigger. We will then retrieve details about the person submitting the timesheet by looking up their details in Graph based upon the Authorization token that is provided from Power Virtual Agents. We will subsequently call a UI Flow where our data will be inputted into the timesheet application. From there we will return our status back to the bot conversation so that our user knows that their timesheet has been successfully saved.
Summary
The use of RPA will help with routine, mundane and repetitive task. This blog covers various scenarios covered on topic “RPA in Enterprise Integration”. The key parts of discussion focus on the RPA, Chat Bot, Power Automate and Power Virtual Agents. The discussion extended with Demo of Time Sheet applications using Power Automate and Power Virtual Agents.
The post RPA in Enterprise Integration appeared first on BizTalk360.
At Integrate 2020 we announced the release of Resource Map which is a new feature in Serverless360. The aim of the feature is to help you organise your cloud estate and keep it structures within a logical model which will help to demystify the complexity of viewing your estate through the physical deployment model which the Azure Portal gives you. Resource Map will allow you to group resources into logical scopes which will make sense to a non Azure Expert and it will help your team keep on top of keeping a clean and well organised environment.
The below picture shows how we will have a tree representation of your estate where resources can be given to scope. When a scope is tidy it will show up as green and when there is clean up required it will show as red or yellow indicating resources arent organised.
Once your resources are mapped to a scope, you can then indicate which resources are dev/test/production versions of each other covering all of your test environments so you can view a cross tab indicating which resources belong to which environment.
You will also be able to do things like automate the allocation of resources in your map and do things like cost analysis below:
I also added a couple of videos which extend on my demos from Integrate 2020
Intro to Resource Map
Setting up Resource Map Manually
More info is on this post on the Serverless360 blog below.
This blog is an extraction of the session “Setting up a highly available BizTalk Server in Azure” in the Integrate 2020 event presented by Samuel Kastberg, Senior Premier Field Engineer at Microsoft.
It gives you an overview of setting a highly available BizTalk Server in Azure using BizTalk2020 at a very high level. More and more it is common to install BizTalk environments in Azure. As especially Production environments require high availability, today Samuel gives guidance on HA related topics like network configuration, load balancing and alternatives for clustering SQL Server
Things we will focus on
Focus on BizTalk Server 2020
No consideration on moving to Azure Integration services
Things that are different/ specific to Azure
Considerations
When you are setting up the BizTalk server environment, we have lots of considerations. When it comes to Azure just as on-premises you have set of rules and it will vary on how your environment works, your requirements, organization policies, what kindly of policies were followed.
Here are some important aspects,
Governance
Rules, requirements from Organizations
Set of Products what you are working
BizTalk server
SQL
MSDTC
MSMQ
IIS
Clustering
Shared Storage
Networking
Load balancer
Network Security Group (NSG)
Application Gateway
Provisioning Automation
ARM templates
Scripting, e.g. PowerShell
Performance
Expectations
Measure
Resource Sizing
Governance
When it comes to Governance, it will be considered based on your organization’s flexibility.
Things like,
What set of policies and rules to be used?
How the resources will work in Azure?
We need to determine first-hand with the owners or administrators of the corresponding Azure subscription. For Example,
Who is the owner of different things?
Who can perform different sets of actions?
And for resources, the following are the important aspects to be considered
They will be placed in the Azure subscription under the resource groups.
In order to organize the resources in the subscriptions, it will be different from business to business. For example, some customers have one subscription for everything and different subscriptions for different environments (Dev, QA, Production)
This way it is easy for the admins or decision-makers to determine the privileges to be given for each environment.
To organize the resources, it is important to device the plan like whether all the machines should be in the same resource group or hub (BizTalk Servers and SQL servers in different groups).
And of course, who will be the owner of the resources is differs from customers to customers.
Resource tagging is another important criterion where you need to tag the resources in order to identify different environments (Dev, QA, Production)
Cost Management
This is one of the essential criteria when you are working with Azure as the bill will be paid every month based on resource usage. Basically, a license in the Azure costs the difference between different products. Users will pay in advance for the resources or pay per usage. Purely, it depends on what kinds of enterprise you have with the Azure.
Tip: Azure pre-purchased License cost will be cheaper than when you pay as go.
Resource Provisioning is an essential task, you need to determine where you will organize your files and how to use it?
Security
Security is another important aspect to be considered. You need to have your account, groups, and determine the access control between your Azure Active Directory and the hub with networking security.
Networking
Basically, BizTalk will access to different folders in the on-prem solutions. And, communicate with SQL servers, Services (Http, Https), and other infrastructure elements. To have a seamless connection, the proper plan needs to devise with your infrastructure team.
Products
If we look at a little bit on the product side that is necessary to set up highly available here are some of the products SQL Server, MSMQ, BizTalk Server, MSDTC.
Here are some important aspects to be considered,
SQL server
Only IAAS is supported (the only version of SQL that supports SQL transactions)
Licensing BYOL or pay as you go
Backup BYOL or pay as you go
Backups to Blob storage
Tip: In Azure, it is cheaper with blob storage than using the file.
SQL Server High Availability (HA)
Availability Groups that own its own storage
Failover Cluster instance (FCI)
Shared Storage
MSMQ HA
Shared Storage
Storage spaces direct
BizTalk server
Licensing BYOL or pay as you go
BizTalk server HA
Clustering for single instance hosts
Enterprise SSO Master Secret Server
Application gateway for incoming HTTP traffic
MSDTC HA
Clustering and configure the Load Balancer
Fixed port
Use the same cluster role as SQL
Shared storage
Clustering
For the clustering,
Networking, you must use a load balancer to route traffic.
Shared storage (will see the alternative solutions).
Internal load balancer
Let’s see the structure of the Internal load balancer
SKU Matters
There are two SKU Matters available as Basic and Standard for the load balancer. In the standard, there is always needed to have the network security group and the network card you select should be in standard SKU’s.
Frontend
The front end is the service address. It could be SQL, MSDTC, EntSSO, etc.,
Backend pool is the virtual machines and address
To identify which machine is the current owner of the service, the health probe should be configured. This way load balance will ping and check the currently available service.
Load Balancing Rules
It will bind the front and the backend.
Port mapping is taken place here to determine only one port to be configured.
The other parameter is the Cluster. The ProbePort parameter needs to be set as it will check the health of the load balancer.
Shared storage
This will be needed for clustering when you use Fail over clustering,
MSMQ, MSDTC. So, there are alternatives, storage spaces direct which is a software-defined storage solution that uses SMB3. The synchronization is happening for a number of VM’s that have two or more disks dedicated to the specific storage spaces. You can create disk areas that represent the clusters and used by the services. For MSDTC, It is only available for Windows 2019 and onwards.
Performance
Virtual machines are coming in different editions, that are optimized to handle different kinds of workloads on the size that matters. It is one of the important aspects that we must look into it,
Selected VM size/option
Optimized for different workloads
Size matters for disk speed
Review what you need CPU/Memory
Remember licensing – BYOL/Pay as you go
Disk speed/size
Size matters, size of the disk, and VMS affects IOPS that can be reached.
It was indeed a fantastic session by Samuel. I hope it gives you an overview of setting up a highly available BizTalk Server in Azure using BizTalk2020 at a very high level. Happy clustering!
Recently I added to the Integration Playbook an article talking about how we handle configuration settings for Logic Apps on the local dev box and devops pipelines with App Config, Key Vault and Pipeline Variables. There are a few videos walking through the approach
Do you feel difficult to keep up to date on all the frequent updates and announcements in the Microsoft Integration platform and Azure iPaaS?
Integration weekly update can be your solution. It’s a weekly update on the topics related to Integration – enterprise integration, robust & scalable messaging capabilities and Citizen Integration capabilities empowered by Microsoft platform to deliver value to the business.
This blog is an extraction of the session “BizTalk 2020 and Beyond” in Integrate 2020 Remote event presented by Valerie Robb, Senior Program Manager at Microsoft.
It gives a detailed overview of BizTalk Server 2020 and future of BizTalk On Premise solutions. This session has also update on BizTalk Migration Tool. BizTalk Solutions
BizTalk Server 2020
Valerie started the session with Microsoft has announced the release of BizTalk Server 2020 early this year 15th January. Explained what’s new features How the features of BizTalk Server 2020 have been developed year on year (2017, 2018 & 2019) after BizTalk Server 2016.
BizTalk Beyond 2020 Version
It’s most anticipated announcement from Microsoft Product Team about the future of BizTalk Server. BizTalk Product Team have the plan about the vNext version with Cloud Native and Hybrid Solutions. However, timeline to release of next version is not determined, but It could be as like of BizTalk Server 2016 incremental updates (Service Pack). It’s too early to predict the next version of BizTalk Server, it’s purely based on platforms which runs on and update which version of Visual Studio/ SQL Server supports.
BizTalk Migration Tool
Announcement of BizTalk to Azure Integration Tool is the next major update in the session. The following are the highlights of BizTalk Migration Tools;
Command Line Tool to assist with Migrating
Runs against BizTalk MSI files to gather information about the BizTalk solution
Currently in development – Fall availability planned
Will be Open Source as designed to be extensible and written in C#
Migration Tool has divided into six stages, each with their own interfaces;
Discover
Parse
Analyze
Report
Convert
Verify
AIM
Azure Integration Migration is the abbreviation for the tool command line. It starts the migration with assess command with source path to BizTalk MSI Directory. It will assess the BizTalk MSI and point the hosting environment with Azure CLI Tools.
Migration Tool has other command line options
Migrate: This command will execute the following stages in migration process
Discover
Parse
Analyze
Report
Convert: Runs only the stages associated with conversion stage
Verify: Runs only the stages associated with verification stage
Migration Report
Azure Integration Migration Tool will generate report with detailed information about
Discovered Resources
Each Application Artifacts migration – for example FTP Adapter is migrating to FTP Connector in Azure, some manual intervention is needed to authenticate the FTP Server
Migration Path
Next, speaker explains how the resources are associated in Azure. Explained how Logic Apps able to send message using FTP and other connectors, how will use Routing to upload to the subscriber(s). For Example, Logic Apps use the Integration Account to converted Flat File schema into XML Schema.
Service Bus Topics
Demonstrated content-based routing and abilities to use context properties with the Service Bus Topics and APIM Routing Manager.
It is initial migration tool with basic information being migrated to Azure. There are gaps needs to be filled based on the customer feedback. BizTalk to Azure Integration Migration Tool is opened source and user can extensible the tool to migrate the BizTalk Applications to Azure.
BRE is not part of migration tool
EDI(X12), EDIFACT is not possible now
Conclusion
Microsoft has encouraged the customers of BizTalk On-premise to use the latest Azure Technologies. AIM is in initial phase to migrate the BizTalk Solutions from on-prem to Cloud. Future will be focused on Cloud Native + Hybrid integration.
This blog is an extraction of the session “BizTalk Server 2020 – Migration Path” presented by Sandro Pereira at Integrate 2020.
Back in January 2020, Microsoft announced the availability of BizTalk Server 2020 for public release with lots of exciting features and enhancements. It’s the time to migrate to the new version to enjoy the features. Sandro, Microsoft Azure MVP talks about the upgrade process, key information, and step-by-step instructions for upgrading from any of the previous BizTalk Server version. It also covers the reasons to upgrade to BizTalk Server 2020.
Why should you upgrade your BizTalk Platform?
People in the Integration space would always remember the BizTalk stickers that they receive from Sandro and here it is for BizTalk 2020.
Here are a few reasons:
Lots of support
If you are in an older version of BizTalk, then it’s time for you to migrate for continuous support especially the Enterprise clients.
Environmental constraints
BizTalk Server heavily depends on performance of the Windows server and SQL server. It’s time to upgrade for better performance
New features
Every release of BizTalk comes with a bunch of exciting features for Hybrid Integration
Support for TLS 1.2
Support for XSLT 3.0 which is a feature asked for many years
More privacy and security for GDPR
Feature packs
New features can be added through the feature packs, so you need not wait for 3 to 4 years for the new features
Move to cloud
Ability to run on Azure VM as IaaS
Administrator and Developer productivity enhancements
New Visual Studio console features
What are the migration options?
Migrate to Azure
Migrate to BizTalk Server 2020
Migrate to Azure
Hosted Azure Servers
This is the easy option as most of them run BizTalk on the Azure VMs. There are options of high availability and, they can be hosted in various regions.
Migrating to Azure Services
This is completely moving out of BizTalk. All the BizTalk related artefacts will be migrated to the Azure services. It is a complete redesign of the Integration solution. For example, there will be no MessageBox and Service Bus needs to be used to persist the messages. It is a difficult option even with the new BizTalk Migration Tool.
BizTalk Server has a rapid release cadence of major version every 2/3 years with radical changes. Azure is completely different. BizTalk server with the long release history is very stable. On the other hand, there is release for Azure every week and the features get deprecated. There is no one to one mapping in Azure. The process on arrival needs to be improved in Azure. There are some interesting options still missing in Azure like Business Rules.
BizTalk 2020 Migration
In- Place Upgrade
Here is the list of the supported and unsupported migration options:
There are few constraints like the SQL Adapter that has been deprecated, TIBCO Enterprise Message Adapter has been removed and the RosettaNet has issues in BizTalk 202 for which the hotfix needs to be installed for smooth functioning.
Migrate to the brand-new environment
The AS-IS migration
This is without any non-mandatory changes. The .Net framework needs to be changed, the deployment properties need to fix and the solution to be rebuilt.
Migrate and Improve
This needs to be done on the analysis of the business requirements and what needs to be improved on the solution side. This requires more prolonged version of testing as lot of improvements would be added and for the integration between different teams.
With his experience of more than 16 years working in BizTalk, Sandro shares the statistics on the effort of different migration options.
There are some pain points while migrating the BizTalk Server artifacts/components.
Mappings will be critical
Older versions are difficult to migrate
SAP adapter is removed. So, all generated schemas need to be recreated
EDI might have problems. Because of TPM, parties cannot be directly migrated. You will need to use the BizTalk Server Party Migration Tool
BTDF is not available
RFID and Human workflows are removed
BRE is a simple export/import
How easy is the migration from the older versions
Wrap Up
Hope the insights on the BizTalk Server 2020 gives a clear picture on the migration path. Sandro and Tom Canter are working on the book on the BizTalk2020 Migration which would be available soon.
