BizTalk Server 2006 Operations : Configuration and Management

Administration Tools

The following list defines the tools used to configure and manage BizTalk Server groups, deploy BizTalk Server applications, troubleshoot errors, control security settings, define trading partners, monitor business activities, and administer workflows:

• BizTalk Server Administration Console: Is theMicrosoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in that has been significantly enhanced to serve as the primary management tool for BizTalk Server. The BizTalk Administration MMC provides a graphical user interface for performing all of the deployment operations for a BizTalk application. It also provides BizTalk group management, message and orchestration troubleshooting such as resume/retry messages and terminate suspended messages/instances, as well as party definition and platform settings.

• BTSTask command-line tool: Is the new command-line administration and deployment tool in BizTalk Server 2006 that supersedes BTSDeploy.

• BTSDeploy command-line tool: Was the command-line tool in BizTalk Server 2004 for deploying/undeploying assemblies and importing/exporting port and orchestration binding settings to/from the BizTalk Management Database. BTSDeploy is included in BizTalk Server 2006 to support scripts that administrators had developed for BizTalk Server 2004.

  While BTSDeploy scripts will continue to work, BizTalk administrators should use BTSTask commands when creating new scripts and consider converting existing scripts. BTSDeploy may be removed in subsequent versions of BizTalk Server.

  
  

• Scripting and Programmability APIs: Are exposed as Microsoft Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) or BizTalk Explorer Object Model objects. Along with the BTSTask command-line tool, these APIs facilitate creation and execution of scripts to automate very detailed administrative tasks.

  NOTE

  The WMI object model exposes and simplifies administrative APIs. All administration APIs expose some form of the following operations on every object they manage: create, enumerate, modify, and delete. WMI exposes this functionality in a consistent manner for all WMI objects.

• BizTalk Explorer toolbar: Is used in Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 to allow developers to perform common administrative tasks from a single integrated development environment (IDE).

• BizTalk Server Configuration tool: Allows each installed BizTalk Server feature to be fully configured, exported, imported, and unconfigured. Configuration of a feature typically involves defining a SQL database to hold setting information, NT service accounts and groups for runtime access permissions, and other feature-specific settings.

• Business Activity Services (BAS) web site: Is aMicrosoft Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) web site that provides business users with a friendly interface for interacting with trading partners and business processes in a familiar environment.

• Business Activity Monitoring (BAM): Is set up and configured through the Visio-based Orchestration Designer for Business Analysts (ODBA), the Microsoft Office Excel workbook (BAM.xls), the Tracking Profile Editor (TPE), the BM.exe command-line deployment tool, and the BAM portal web site. BAM provides business users with a way to see a real-time or aggregated holistic view of their business processes.

• Health and Activity Tracking (HAT): Tracks the health and run history of your BizTalk messages and orchestration processes and aids in identifying errors and bottlenecks in the BizTalk Server environment. Use HAT to view the technical details of a particular orchestration, pipeline, or message instance, as well as see the message flow of a particular message from end to end within the BizTalk system. Business users can also view, monitor, and query completed messages and processes via tracked data, saving these queries as custom views for reuse. Business analysts and end users can track the state of their business processes by viewing both live and archived data.

  Some features previously in BizTalk Server 2004 HAT such as retry/resume messages have been moved to the Group Hub and Query pages in the improved BizTalk Server 2006 Administration Console.

  
  

• Enterprise Single Sign-On (SSO) Administration: Is a Microsoft Management Console snap-in that enables SSO Administrators, SSO Affiliate Administrators, and Application Administrators to update the SSO database; to add, delete, and manage applications; to administer user mappings; and to set credentials for the affiliate application users. Some operations can be performed only by the SSO Administrators and others by the SSO Affiliate Administrators. All operations that can be performed by the BizTalk Application Administrators can also be performed by the SSO Administrators and SSO Affiliate Administrators.

• Enterprise SSO Client Utility: Enables end users to manage their own mappings and set their credentials using this UI tool.

• Enterprise SSO command-line tools: Consists of three different command-line utilities to performEnterprise Single Sign-On tasks:

  • SSOConfig: Enables an SSO Administrator to configure the SSO database and to manage the master secret.

    NOTE

    The Configuration Wizard creates the SSO database and the master secret server.

  • SSOManage: Enables SSO Administrators, SSO Affiliate Administrators, and Application Administrators to update the SSO database to add, delete, and manage applications; administer user mappings; and set credentials for the affiliate application users. The SSOManage command-line tool contains similar functionality to the SSO Administration MMC snap-in.

  • SSOClient: Enables SSO users to manage their own user mappings and set their credentials.

• BizTalk Web Services Publishing Wizard: Is a wizard for generating an IIS virtual directory and web service for publishing BizTalk orchestrations and schemas via SOAP.

• Business Rule Engine Deployment Wizard: Is a wizard for importing/exporting policies and vocabularies. This tool can also deploy or undeploy a policy in a Rule Engine database.

• Human Workflow Services (HWS) Server Administration Console: Is used to manage human workflow objects. WMI can be used to create and run scripts that perform HWS administrative tasks.

  NOTE

  Human Workflow Services is fully supported with no feature enhancements in BizTalk Server 2006 but is planned for removal in future versions.

Application Concept

BizTalk Server 2006 formalizes the concept of a BizTalk application by providing a logical container for housing all the artifacts for a given solution. This BizTalk application container can hold design-time artifacts (schemas, maps, pipelines, and orchestrations), messaging components (receive ports, receive locations, and send ports), and other related items (rules policies, pre-processing or post-processing scripts, assemblies, and BAS artifacts) that comprise an integrated business process. By leveraging this new concept, the effort to deploy and manage applications is significantly reduced compared to previous versions of BizTalk.

Even as the number of artifacts and components within several complex applications increases, each application can still be managed separately in a simple and intuitive manner. The effect is a streamlining of many everyday tasks, because developers and IT professionals are now able to deploy, manage, start/stop, and troubleshoot at the application level. This results in less confusion and fewer errors. In order to take advantage of the application concept, use the new deployment features in BizTalk Server 2006 or update WMI deployment scripts as necessary. Otherwise, artifacts will deploy to the default application for the BizTalk Group.

BizTalk Server Administration Console

The newly designed BizTalk Server Administration Console was built with applications in mind. The Administration Console provides a complete view of one or more BizTalk Server environments. The BizTalk Administration Console is an MMC snap-in that allows the ability to create, configure, and manage one or more applications across multiple servers. Additionally, the MMC includes the ability to import and export applications for installation across multiple servers or for facilitating moving between staging and production environments.

The console also includes the message- and service-monitoring capabilities previously provided by HAT, the Health and Activity Tracking tool introduced in BizTalk Server 2004. While the Administration Console provides the runtime monitoring, HAT must still be used for document tracking and orchestration debugging.

The enhanced BizTalk Server Administration Console is used to manage the following artifacts:

• BizTalk Group: The BizTalk Group node in the console tree contains additional nodes that represent the artifacts (applications, parties, and platform settings) for that BizTalk Group (see Figure 9-1). BizTalk groups are units of organization that usually represent enterprises, departments, hubs, or other business units that require a contained BizTalk Server implementation. A BizTalk Group has a one-to-one relationship with a BizTalk Management Database.

BizTalk Group Hub page in the BizTalk Server Administration Console

When you select the BizTalk Group node in the BizTalk Server Administration Console, the BizTalk Server Group Hub page is displayed in the details pane. The BizTalk Server Group Hub page, shown in Figure 9-1, provides an overall view of the health of your BizTalk Server system.

Use the Group Hub page in the BizTalk Server Administration Console to investigate orchestration, port, and message failures. The Group Hub page provides access to the current real-time state of the system, accessing data in the Messagebox database to view all service instances such as orchestrations, ports, and messaging, along with their associated messages.

Use the Group Hub page to

• See currently running service instances such as orchestrations and messaging, and their associated messages.

• Look into the Messagebox database for a view of the current data and the real-time state of the system.

• Suspend, terminate, and resume service instances.

• Troubleshoot application configuration errors and view subscriptions.

Use the Query tab on the Group Hub page in the BizTalk Server Administration Console shown in Figure 9-1 to find specific running and suspended service instances, messages, or subscriptions. Queries performed using the Administration Console search through active items, which are stored in the Messagebox database. A new query tab will appear each time you run a new query. To locate tracked, archived, or completed messages or service instances, use the HAT tool.

• Applications: BizTalk applications are new with BizTalk Server 2006. Applications are managed through the BizTalk Server 2006 Administration Console under the Applications node. BizTalk applications provide a way to view and manage the items, or artifacts, that make up a BizTalk business solution. For a new BizTalk Server 2006 installation, a default application named BizTalk Application 1 is created. When upgrading to BizTalk Server 2006 from BizTalk Server 2004, all existing artifacts are placed into BizTalk Application 1. Examples of artifacts are BizTalk assemblies, .NET assemblies, schemas, maps, bindings, and certificates. Artifacts are organized for each application in folders described in the following list:

  • Orchestration: Orchestrations are designed using the Orchestration Designer in Visual Studio and are deployed to the BizTalk Group under which they appear in the Administration Console.

  • Role links: A role link defines the relationship between roles defined by the message and port types used in the interactions in both directions.

  • Send port groups: A send port group is a named collection of send ports used to send the same message to multiple destinations in a single binding configuration.

  • Send ports: A send port is a BizTalk object that sends outbound messages to a specific address combined with a BizTalk Server send pipeline.

  • Receive ports: A receive port is a logical grouping of similar receive locations.

  • Receive locations: A receive location is defined as a specific address at which inbound messages arrive combined with a BizTalk Server receive pipeline that processes the messages received at that address.

  • Policies: A policy is a versioned collection of business rules.

  • Schemas: A schema is the structure for a message. A schema can contain multiple subschemas.

  • Maps: A map is an XML file that defines the corresponding transformations between the records and fields in one or more source schema and the records and fields in one or more destination schema. A map contains an Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) stylesheet that is used by BizTalk Server to perform the transformation.

  • Pipelines: A pipeline is a software infrastructure that defines and links one or more processing stages, running them in prescribed order to complete a specific task such as decode, disassemble validate, etc. Pipelines divide processing into stages, abstractions that describe a category of work. They also determine the sequence in which each category of work is performed.

  • Resources: A resource is a pre-processing or post-processing script, deployed assembly, or other file associated with a BizTalk application.

  • BAS artifacts: Business Activity Services artifacts provide a way for applications to communicate with outside partners. BAS artifacts are made up of partner profiles (also known as parties), partner groups, agreements, and Microsoft Office InfoPath templates. BAS artifacts must first be created using the BAS site before they can be imported and appear in the BizTalk Server Administration Console.

• Parties: A party is an entity outside of BizTalk Server that interacts with an orchestration. All of the partners an organization deals with are considered parties. An organization may have tens to thousands of partners.

• Platformsettings: The PlatformSettings node contains subnodes that represent globally configurable settings that apply across the farm of BizTalk servers in the Group. Those subnodes are

  • Hosts: The Hosts node contains all of the in-process and isolated hosts in the BizTalk Server environment. A BizTalk host is a logical container for items such as adapter handlers, receive locations (including pipelines), and orchestrations. Additional hosts can be created by right-clicking the Hosts node and choosing New => Host.

  • Host Instances: The Host Instances node contains all of the host instances in the current BizTalk Server Group. Host instances are physically manifested as one or more copies of the BizTalk Server runtime process (i.e., NT service instance) that executes application components. New host instances can be created by rightclicking the Host Instances node and choosing New => Host Instance.

  • Servers: The Servers node lists all servers that are joined to the selected BizTalk Server group. These are the computers where BizTalk Server is installed and configured, and where host instances are running. Host instances are created by associating a server with a particular host.

  • Message Boxes: The Message Boxes node contains all Messagebox databases used by the current BizTalk Server Group. Right-clicking the Message Boxes node and choosing New => Message Box allows for creation of additional Messagebox databases. The Messagebox database is the basis for work item load balancing across servers that do cooperative processing. A work item can pass through a Messagebox database more than once during its processing life. The name of the Messagebox database cannot exceed 100 characters.

  • Adapters: The Adapters node contains subnodes for all the Send and Receive Adapters configured for the BizTalk Server Group and the associated adapter handlers. Adapters are the messaging middleware used to send and receive messages between endpoints.