BizTalk Server 2010 R2 Announced

In a previous post, I discussed Microsoft’s integration road map particularly related to Microsoft BizTalk Server.  The foundation of that post was based upon Tony Meleg’s presentation from the World Partner Conference.  The good news is that today, Microsoft has given us a glimpse into what is to come with respect to BizTalk Server.  Previously, Tony cautioned us that Microsoft will continue to support BizTalk and will introduce incremental changes to the platform.  Where as most of the innovation will occur in the Azure AppFabric space.

The next version of BizTalk Server is currently called BizTalk Server 2010 R2.  I suspect they are calling this an “R2” release since it is an evolutionary release that particularly focuses on platform alignment with Windows Server 8, SQL Server 12 and Visual Studio 11.  For those of you who do follow the BizTalk scene closely you may recall that BizTalk Server 2010 was originally called BizTalk Server 2009 R2 when it was in beta.  It was renamed to BizTalk Server 2010 prior to RTM.  So who knows if the BizTalk 2010 R2 name will stick but for now that is the name we will go with.

In addition to the platform alignment that I have already mentioned, we can look forward to some new features in the areas of:

• Adapter connectivity to new data sources including IBM Informix V11 and IBM IMS/DB V11
• Updates to industry schemas like HIPPA, HL7, SWIFT and SWIFTNet
• Improved Performance and Scalability
• Tighter integration with the Azure Service Bus
• Adjustment to licensing geared towards cloud hosting

Of the features mentioned, I certainly will not complain about improved performance and am happy to see tighter integration with Azure AppFabric.  I really hope that they introduce a smoother way of integrating with Azure AppFabric Queues and Subscriptions.

I am a little disappointed that there was no mention of fully supported REST endpoints, but it is early so I am hoping that Microsoft will surprise us with that feature.

I have only touched on some of the new features that will be available.  You can find the complete post from Microsoft here.

BizTalk: Adding BizTalk 360 to your Environment

For those that are not familiar with BizTalk 360, it is a Rich Internet Application (RIA) that allows you to monitor and maintain your BizTalk environment via a Web browser.  From what I can see, from a high level, there are a few components that you install in your BizTalk environment that make up the solution:

• Silverlight Application which can be accessed via a remote web browser
• WCF Service(s) that expose the operations to the Silverlight application
• A Windows Service that handles some of the monitoring and notification features
• A BizTalk 360 database that will store your configuration and audit/governance

My organization recently purchased a license and support from BizTalk 360.  In this blog post I plan on explaining some of the rational and features that influenced our decision.

Requirements

Over the past 5 years our BizTalk environment continues to grow.  With this growth comes more responsibility maintaining it.  Our current middleware team consists of both developers and administrators and therefore there is an on-call rotation that is used to handle the after hours support.  After hours support requirements are very binary; BizTalk’s infrastructure is either on or off.  This would include the core components like SQL Server, SSO, Host instances and applications being online.  We are not concerned if a single message is suspended.  The reason?  There is no one from the business available to consult with in order to correctly determine a resolution to the problem.

Also, in parts of Canada the IT Market is getting hot.  Let’s face it there is nothing fun, or cool about being on-call. Even though our environment is very stable, people felt that they were still tied down to their cell phone since we have Service Availability metrics to meet and when an issue occurs response time is very important.  As all BizTalk resources know, BizTalk doesn’t have to be down to get roped into “fire fighting” triage sessions.  Sometimes your large ERP or engineering systems go down and since BizTalk connects into them you are impacted as well. 

The company that I work for is very committed to employee retention and reducing the amount of on-call is a step in the right direction for reducing turnover and keeping employee morale high.

Solution

I know Saravana from the MVP program and at the last MVP Summit Saravana was showing MVPs and some of the BizTalk Product Group an early preview of what is now BizTalk 360.  My initial thoughts included what a nice looking application and some of the features fill a void left by the BizTalk Admin Console but I wasn’t convinced that I had an immediate use for it. 

While I was in Sweden in June, with Richard Seroter,  promoting the book I contributed to, I ran into Saravana again and checked out the progress his start-up made on the product.  Once again I was impressed with the tool but wasn’t sure how I would use it.

Come July and some more concerns about the on-call situation arose and this turned on a light bulb in my head about how we could use BizTalk 360 to help support our environment after hours.  We already have contracted resources that focus on after-hours support for our core infrastructure: Servers, SAN, Network etc.  I thought what if I could piggy back on this existing agreement?  Knowing that I didn’t need BizTalk Experts to keep an eye on my servers after hours, remember the type of service I am looking for is binary: on or off.  BizTalk 360 provides this visibility in a couple ways:

• Dashboard – By looking at this type of screen if is very obvious which artifacts are up and which are down.  Enabling these artifacts is a pretty easy action to perform so I don’t need to pay to have BizTalk Experts monitoring after hours.

 

• Notifications – My company also uses SCOM for monitoring BizTalk and we will continue to do so even with BizTalk 360.  But the feature that I like about BizTalk 360 is the Health Summary email notification that you can configure.  I can now subscribe this after hours team to periodic notifications where they can quickly, and easily, determine the health of the environment.  I don’t want these people logged onto my BizTalk servers hitting F5 all night inside of the BizTalk Admin Console.  Using these email notifications frees them up to work on other things but also provides the visibility that we need.

(Sample email notification – note I have added the black marks to retain some privacy)

Another area that is important to me is the Audit and Governance features that exist.  When trusting a 3rd party to provide support it is very nice to have an audit of what actions took place during support periods.  It protects both the client and the service provider and is a win-win all around.  This is a feature that has been missing from the BizTalk Admin Console that could benefit many organizations.

Overall the process of procuring the BizTalk 360 application has been very positive.  When I first tested out the product there were a few features missing that I really wanted.  Saravana took the time to review them over a Live Meeting, took my high priority needs and was able to provide me with a build on a committed timeline.  Some of my feature requests involve clustered host instances so if you use clustered host instances in your environment – you are welcome!

The BizTalk 360 team is very committed to the product and their customers.  It has been refreshing to work with a company that is so motivated.

Conclusion

Something that I have learned through this process is to always keep your eyes open to new trends and tools.  I find Twitter really helps in this regard by following likeminded individuals.  You don’t need to deep dive on every new technology that you see but it is important to know that it exists as you never know when your requirements may change and you can benefit from it.  Case in point my situation that emerged this past summer.

BizTalk: /n Software Read Only (S)FTP Locations

Another /n Software feature that I recently learned about involves Read Only FTP locations.  The idea behind this feature is the the source system does not want you to remove the file once it has been downloaded.  This could be for a variety of reasons including the file may be available to multiple consumers or the source system would like to archive the file once it has been consumed.

Read only FTP locations is a new supported scenario with BizTalk 2010.  /n Software has supported this scenario for at least a few years.  You can enable this feature by simply specifying the Delete Mode as Never on a Receive Location that is using the /n Software adapter.

So this is all very intriguing,  I am sure,  but it is pretty obvious so why does this deserve a blog post?  The reason for the blog post is to discuss a lesser known property called DownloadCacheFile. After scanning your receive location you will discover that this property is not visible.  This property is exposed through the Other property.  Within this property we can specify DownloadCacheFile=c:\myCacheFile.txt

As files are processed they will be added to this file and a record is kept so that they are not downloaded in subsequent polls of the (S)FTP location.

In the BizTalk 2010 implementation, Microsoft is using a database to store this type of information where as /n Software has chosen the file route.  Time will tell how well this feature works.  I would imagine that there is an upper limit where the file becomes so large that it slows performance or potentially corrupts.

Also note that if you are using a Clustered host instance to host your FTP Receive locations, this file should be in a shared storage location so that the Clustered host instance has access to it no matter which Server it is actively running on.

BizTalk: Configuring /n Software’s SFTP Adapter for Public/Private Key Security

I was recently involved in a project that required secure FTP connectivity between my organization and a partner organization.  We continue to leverage /n Software’s SFTP adapter as we are still running BizTalk 2009 in production and we also find that our partners tend to leverage Secure FTP using SSH (SFTP) as opposed to FTP over SSL (FTPS).  BizTalk 2010 now includes an FTP adapter that supports SSL so we are likely to continue to use the /n Software adapter based upon SSH requirements even once we upgrade to BizTalk 2010.

I am very far from being a Security/Certificate expert so I did learn a few things being involved in this project.  Hopefully if you have Secure FTP requirements that you will find this post helpful.

 

Generating Public and Private Keys

In my scenario, our trading partner required us to provide them with our Public key.  They wanted us to generate Private and Public keys.  They would then take our public key and install it in their SFTP server.  To generate these keys I simply used GlobalScape’s CuteFTP 8.3 Professional.

Note: Your mileage may vary here.  There are some requirements that were enforced by our Trading partner including the Key type and the number of bits required for encryption.

1. Click on Tools -> Global Options

2. Click on Create identity file

3. Use DSA

4. Provide a Passphrase

5. Enter a location for files to be generated and ensure the key length is set to 1024

Configuring BizTalk Receive Location

Since the Receive Location configuration is a little lengthy I am going to break it down into the various sections.

SFTP

Pretty basic settings here dealing with when we want to Delete, what file masks we want to look for and the folder on the remote SFTP server that we want to navigate to once we have successfully established connectivity.

SSH

The first area to focus on in the SSH section is the SSH Accept Server Host Key.  When you set the Accept Any  to Yes the SSH Accept Server Host Key property will revert to Any.  I equate this action with when you try to connect to an SFTP server using a client like CuteFTP.  You will get prompted with a dialog asking if you would like to accept the public key being pushed from the SFTP server.  The way I understand how this works is that this public key will get validated against your private key.  Should everything match up you should be able to establish a connection.

The next property to focus on is the SSH AuthMode.  We want to set this value to be Public Key.  There are a few different options when it comes to setting the Authentication mode.  One includes setting a password but for this particular partner they wanted to use Public Key authentication.  When we set this value we then need to provide the location of our private key which happens to be called Identity (without a file extension).

To provide our Private key we need to click on the ellipse button.

 

We will now be prompted with a dialog that allows us to select our Private key from a variety of sources.  In my scenario I wanted to select my key from the file system.  In order to do so I needed to select the PEM tab and then browse to my key.  Since I have enabled my key to use a password I need to provide a password and then I can click the Open button.  Once I did this my private key would appear in the TextArea box and I can click Ok.

The rest of the configuration deals with some connectivity details including the name of the FICTICOUS Host and a SSH User (a tribute to Steve Jobs who has recently stepped down from being Apple’s CEO) .  The SSH Port is using the default port of 22  and even though it appears as if I have provided a password that is the default mask provided by the adapter.

 

Conclusion

So as much as people love to talk about the cloud these days and using the Service Bus and WCF bindings, the bottom line is that companies continue to rely upon “legacy” technologies such as SFTP.  In my scenario, this trading partner is a very large institution so it is not as if they are a little “Mom and Pop” shop. 

BizTalk 2010 Training Kits now available

Both Developer and Administrator Training Kits have been recently released.  Inside of these training kit you can expect functional Virtual Machines, with the BizTalk software installed, training module documents and PowerPoint presentations.  This is the content that you would typically find in a Microsoft Official Curriculum course.  The best part about these kits is they are made available for free.

I had the opportunity to collaborate with Jerry Anderson from Pluralsight on the Administration course.  My contributions primarily focused on Module 6: Monitoring a BizTalk Environment with System Center Operations Manager (SCOM).

The BizTalk 2010 Developer Training Kit was released back in July and is available here.  The Administration course was released on August 21 and can be found here.

Enjoy!!!

BizTalk 2010: Line of Business Systems Integration Book has been released

For the past 10 months I have been involved in a project with 4 other talented individuals.  This project was a little different than the projects that I have been involved with in the past.  While other projects have always had some sort of documentation deliverable, documentation, in the form of a book was the main deliverable this time around.

While many BizTalk books exists, we felt there was an opportunity when it came to discussing Line of Business integration with BizTalk Server 2010.  With the amount of talent involved in this book, I am very confident we have filled some of the void that exists on this topic.

I would like the thank the following authors for their tremendous efforts:

• Richard Seroter
• Sergei Moukhnitski
• Thiago Almeida
• Carl Darski

I also want to thank our Technical Reviewers who spent a lot of hours reviewing our content and definitely increased the quality of the book:

• Ben Cline
• Stephen Thomas
• Mick Badran

You may now find the book available on the Packt Publishing site and on Amazon.com.

Sample Chapter available for upcoming BizTalk LOB Book

I see that Packt Publishing has included a link to a sample chapter in our upcoming book called Microsoft BizTalk 2010: Line of Business Systems Integration.  The sample chapter selected  is: Integrating with Dynamics 2009.  You can read more about the book here and can find the sample chapter download here.

I don’t have a publish date but I expect it to be imminent.  The content has been provided to the printer.  I will update this post once a publish date is available.