A large percentage of issues in the numerous BizTalk 2004 environments I have encountered with at my current client have been related to configuration. The current build of the environments are conducted in a semi automated fashion; the initial build is performed by Altiris and then there are a number of steps carried out either manually or through automation scripts thereafter.
This is obviously far from ideal, as any manual configuration is prone to errors. The favoured solution would be to script the build of the entire environment and then provide a simple button for some operational employee to click that would go off and build the whole thing for you.
There are products out there that can achieve this for you, an example being Microsoft’s APF (Automated Purposing Framework) that they apparently use to do just that internally. However, your client may not be in a position to implement an external product to conduct any automation of builds for various reasons, so you would be stuck in a similar predicament whereby the build is a mishmash of manual and automated steps.
To complicate matters further, the environment at my current client is built to be a shared service. A standard integration platform based on BizTalk 2004 is deployed in the numerous environments (dev, system test, pre-production and production) and then applications are installed on top of this platform. The complexity here is that each of those applications may also have some environment configuration requirements and in one particular case we have a large, business critical application that makes numerous changes to this generic platform.
That is enough of the background information. The point to this narrative is that managing configuration of integration platform environments can be quite complex. Tools to consider when attempting mitigating the risks involved include automated build tools as mentioned above, but also configuration management tools such as the product that I have been pushed to evaluate for this purpose at my current client – Microsoft DCM (Desired Configuration Monitoring).
Now I will hold my hands up here. Until recently Configuration Management had been a concept for others to contend with. In my professional career I have been primarily involved with development until getting involved with BizTalk since the 2004 version. Therefore my exposure to technologies such as SMS (Systems Management Server), MOM (Microsoft Operations Manager) and the like had also been limited. During the last few years I have found MOM to be a very useful solution and due to necessity I am now finding SMS and DCM to also be equally useful when attempting to solve the numerous challenges involved when managing an Integration Services platform.
My initial focus has been on evaluating DCM and was the main reason for this post. This evaluation has simply entailed investigating the potential use by focusing on the manifests used by the DCM tool to report upon a server’s configuration. In case you have not come across DCM before, manifests are simply XML files that define a number of rules according to the DCM schema that are then used by the tool to report on any differences found on a specified server.
So for example, you may wish to create a rule that ascertains whether the HTTP Batch size on your BizTalk 2004 HTTP Send Host server is set to 1. Perhaps this setting is essential for the applications hosted on that environment to function as expected. In this case you would use the freely supplied Authoring Tool to enter the configuration rule, save the manifest and then execute DCM, passing in this manifest to use. As a quick note, for our investigation we are conducting this manually through the executable directly rather than utilising SMS where the functionality can be automated.
Anyway, I have been using this tool for a number of days and have to say in some frustration. I understand that this whole solution is freely available from Microsoft so you should not expect too much, but the whole authoring process seems unnecessarily complex and convoluted. The XML schema in particular seems to be illogical and the authoring tool hampers progress as much as aids it. This may lead the cynic in some people to think this was done on purpose so that Microsoft could sell their consulting services to produce ready built manifests and/or assist in the creation of those that are not already available.
However, once you have defined your manifest(s) the tool is certainly a useful addition to your armoury when dealing with the issues described earlier. Due to the amount of configuration applied to our environments I was never entirely convinced that they had been configured as per the instructions. Even the automated steps could potentially have incorrect parameters passed to them due to process. So being able to use DCM to check the most obvious configurations were applied correctly certainly assisted in providing a higher level of confidence.
So for me, this freely available utility has given me an immediate benefit even when a reasonable amount of investment time up front when authoring the manifests has to be factored in. This has been gained simply by executing the tool manually, the next step will be to look at the automation of this through SMS and the generation of reports based upon the results.
However, we may not be taking this particular route just yet. We may decide to stay with the simple manual execution for the meantime and look at establishing Microsoft Systems Center at the client, which introduces Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007 – the successor to DCM. I have had a relatively brief presentation of this product by Microsoft and have to say I was quite impressed. It seems to encapsulate MOM, SMS and DCM within a more integrated solution while providing much needed enhancements to those individual products.
If you have any vested interest in making sure your environments are managed affectively and have any investments in those products, if you have not already spent some time investigating Microsoft System Center I would strongly suggest you do.