BizTalk’s September theme on TechNet is performance and there have been several new whitepapers created and published as part of this theme.  BizTalk Server 2006: Managing a Successful Performance Lab was a collaborative effort between the BizTalk TAP team, Product Team, Ranger Team, and MCS, and an attempt to establish a canonical process around managing a performance lab that can assist the field, partners, and end customers tackling such an engagement.  Inevitably, we hope this will lead to more successful implementations of BizTalk in the future:



Part of every application’s pre-production testing should include performance and stress testing.  You should know the limits of your platform and your applications with certainty prior to ever receiving or sending a live message in production use.



Performance and stress testing can also intersect with capacity planning.  Understanding upfront what type of hardware you’ll require and how much will be critical for your business.  Also, if your company has very strict requirements for volume or latency with constraints on hardware, proving that the system can meet the required goals with expected hardware will be key.



This document exists to provide some general guidance around approaching performance labs with BizTalk Server 2006.  For specifics, we have made reference to correlated documents that already exist on the web or in the product documentation for additional assistance.



Another interesting read is the BizTalk Server 2006 Comparative Adapter Study whitepaper which describes the results of a comparative adapter study-a set of tests that compared each adapter that ships with Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 against its BizTalk Server 2004 SP1 counterpart under identical conditions.


Happy reading!