With the release of BizTalk Server 2006, the fourth generation of the Microsoft business process integration server, customers gained the benefits of integration with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 and 64-bit support. BizTalk Server 2006 also enhanced the existing administration functionality, introduced new capabilities for business activity monitoring (BAM), and enhanced the core messaging engine. BizTalk Serveris built on the core architecture of BizTalk Server 2006 and made strides in all dimensions of application-to-application, business-to-business, and business-process automation.
BizTalk Server 2010 further enhances the user experience and introduces features that enable BizTalk Server customers to better manage and represent their businesses in a BizTalk Server setup. This release of BizTalk Server also provides key usability enhancements for BizTalk Server administrators and developers. This topic describes the new and enhanced features available with BizTalk Server 2010.
- BizTalk Server Settings Dashboard
- Improved Management Pack
- FTP Adapter Enhancements
- Enhanced Trading Partner Management
- Enhanced support for HIPAA documents
- Enhanced BizTalk Mapper
- Support for .NET Framework 4
- SQL Server Backup Compression in BizTalk Server
- SQL Server Transparent data encryption (TDE) in BizTalk Server
- Monitoring known issues in BizTalk Server
- Customer Experience Improvement Program in BizTalk Server
- Updated Platform Support
BizTalk Server Settings Dashboard
The BizTalk Settings Dashboard in BizTalk Server 2010 collates all the performance settings and provides a central console to manage them. For more information about how to use Settings Dashboard for performance optimization, see Managing BizTalk Server Performance Settings.
Improved Management Pack
System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) provides capabilities that can improve the manageability of Microsoft products through centralized and proactive availability and health monitoring. The BizTalk Server Management Pack for Operations Manager provides comprehensive discovery and monitoring of BizTalk Server components and applications. With BizTalk Server 2010, the following enhancements are introduced in BizTalk Server management pack:
- Separate views for enterprise IT administrators and BizTalk administrators. There are two different personas that need to monitor a BizTalk Server environment, the enterprise IT administrator and the BizTalk Server administrator.
- An enterprise IT administrator is interested in monitoring the state and health of the various enterprise deployments the machines hosting the SQL Server databases, machines hosting the ENTSSO service, host instance machines, IIS, network services, etc. In general, an enterprise administrator is interested in the overall health of the “physical deployment” of a BizTalk Server setup.
- A BizTalk administrator is interested in monitoring the state and health of various BizTalk Server artifacts and applications such as orchestrations, send ports, receive locations, etc. In general, a BizTalk administrator is interested in monitoring and tracking BizTalk Server health and if corrective measures are required to ensure that the applications are running as expected.
- An enterprise IT administrator is interested in monitoring the state and health of the various enterprise deployments the machines hosting the SQL Server databases, machines hosting the ENTSSO service, host instance machines, IIS, network services, etc. In general, an enterprise administrator is interested in the overall health of the “physical deployment” of a BizTalk Server setup.
- Optimized discovery of artifacts across multiple machines. In a typical BizTalk Server setup, a BizTalk group contains multiple runtime machines. When such an environment is monitored using SCOM, monitoring agents running on the machines discover the same set of artifacts from the configuration database which results in duplicate artifacts getting displayed on the SCOM console. With BizTalk Server 2010 management pack, the monitoring agents discover the artifacts from a single machine.
- Optimized discovery of relationships between artifacts. With BizTalk Server 2010, the management pack optimizes the discovery of relationships between different BizTalk Server artifacts by properly sequencing the discovery of the artifacts before the discovery of relationships. For example, to establish the relationship between a receive port and a receive location, the management pack must first discover the receive port and receive location and then discover the relationship between them. In previous releases of the BizTalk Server pack, the ordering of discoveries was not proper.
- Visual representation of health status. The SCOM implements color schemes to visually represent the health status of all BizTalk Server related artifacts. For example, the platform-level artifacts such as host instances can either be in a running or stopped state. This is represented with colors green and red respectively. Similarly, BizTalk application level artifacts can be categorized into three buckets: green, yellow, and red. If all instances of an orchestration are running and it is in a perfect running state, the health status is represented in green. If less than 70% of the orchestration instances are faulted, the health status is represented in yellow. If more than 70% of the orchestration instances are faulted or in case of critical errors, the health status is represented in red.
The BizTalk Server 2010 management pack changes the parameters that are used for monitoring the health of a BizTalk Server deployment. While in the previous management packs only the configuration state (e.g. orchestration state) was considered for health monitoring, in BizTalk Server 2010 management pack the runtime state (e.g. the number of suspended instances) is also used to monitor the health status. For example, the visual representation of a send port may change to yellow or red not only if the send port is not properly configured but also if there are some suspended instances of the artifact.
- Diagnostic support. In addition to exposing the artifacts with errors, the BizTalk Server 2010 management pack provides diagnostic support by including basic information about the error. For example, if a send port turns yellow from green, diagnostics is automatically run and the user can troubleshoot the reason for this change in the State Change Events tab of the Health Explorer.
- Other performance enhancements. With the previous releases of management pack, when an artifact is monitored, even the smallest change to the artifact is written to the SCOM database. To avoid frequent calls to the database and to improve system performance, the BizTalk Server 2010 management pack highlights issue and changes to properties that require attention of an IT administrator and are less likely to be modified very frequently. The BizTalk Server 2010 management pack also fixes performance issues related to high resource utilization if the discovery intervals are set too low.
FTP Adapter Enhancements
The BizTalk FTP adapter exchanges data between BizTalk Server and an FTP server and enables integration of data stored on varied platforms with different line-of-business applications. With BizTalk Server 2010, the FTP adapter is enhanced to provide the following feature additions:
- Support for transferring data to and from a secure FTP server. The FTP adapter in BizTalk Server 2010 supports reading and writing data from a secure FTP server. The adapter provides support for file transfer from an FTP server over Secure Socket Layer (SSL)/Transport Level Security (TLS).
- Support for downloading file from locations marked as read-only. In the FTP adapter available with the previous releases of BizTalk Server, the adapter deletes the file after downloading so that it does not download the file again in the next polling cycle. Due to this design, the adapter was limited to download files only from FTP locations that provide write access. With BizTalk Server 2010, the FTP adapter is enhanced to support downloading of files from read-only locations as well.
- Support for atomic file transfer in ASCII mode. The FTP adapter available with the previous releases of BizTalk Server provides atomic file transfer only for binary mode. With BizTalk Server 2010, the FTP adapter is enhanced to support atomic file transfer for ASCII mode as well.
Enhanced Trading Partner Management
For more information about the enhancements to the Trading Partner Management feature in BizTalk Server 2010, see Building Blocks of a Trading Partner Management Solution.
Enhanced support for HIPAA documents
For more information about the enhanced HIPAA support in BizTalk Server 2010, see HIPAA Document Schema Version 5010.
Enhanced BizTalk Mapper
For more information about the enhancements to the BizTalk Mapper feature in BizTalk Server 2010, see Enhancements to BizTalk Mapper.
Support for .NET Framework 4
For more information about how BizTalk Server 2010 supports .NET Framework 4, see Updated .NET Framework Support.
SQL Server Backup Compression in BizTalk Server
SQL Server backup compression is a new feature that is introduced in SQL Server 2008 Enterprise edition. In BizTalk Server 2010, backup compression enables you to create compressed backups of BizTalk Server databases that are business critical and consume large amounts of disk space.
When you run backup compression, custom databases that are a part of BizTalk backup jobs will also be compressed. Database backups will happen without compression if backup compression is enabled on databases that belong to nonenterprise editions of SQL Server. If you are a SysAdmin, a warning message will be displayed in the SQL Server’s Event Viewer.
| Creating compressed backups is supported only in SQL Server 2008 Enterprise and later versions. |
NoteUpgrade Scenarios
If you have upgraded to BizTalk Server 2010 from BizTalk Server 2009/2006R2 and you plan to use backup compression then you must browse to the drive:\Program Files\Microsoft BizTalk Server <2009/2006R2 >\Schema directory, and then run Backup_Setup_All_Procs.sql against all the custom databases that you want to back up. This updates the stored procedures.
Performance Impact
- By reducing the size of your BizTalk backups, you save significantly on disk media.
- Reduces the amount of time to backup BizTalk Server databases.
- Backup compression increases CPU usage, and the additional CPU consumed by the compression process might impact concurrent BizTalk Server operations.
- We recommend that you do not enable database backup compression when you are using transparent data encryption (TDE). This is because the compression ratio of encrypted data is far less than unencrypted data.
SQL Server Transparent data encryption (TDE) in BizTalk Server
Transparent data encryption (TDE) is a new encryption feature introduced in Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008. It provides protection for the entire database “at rest”, meaning the data and log files without affecting existing applications.
In BizTalk Server 2010, the transparent data encryption (TDE) feature of SQL Server can be used to protect data that contains confidential and sensitive information such as customer orders with credit card information in messages. This information must be secured in order to comply with privacy legislation and industry standards. For example, the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS) (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=195137) specifies a set of requirements designed to ensure that ALL companies that process, stores or transmit credit card information maintain a secure environment.
You may want to protect stored cardholder data and restrict access to cardholder data by business need-to-know. To help secure BizTalk Server, SQL TDE offers a way to encrypt data files so that data in backups cannot be read if the reader does not have access to a decryption key and a password. This reduces the risk of sensitive data being compromised even if physical access to the backed up data is obtained.
When enabling TDE, we recommend that you take backups of all BizTalk Server databases and store it in a secure off-site location. You must ensure that the state of TDE encryption is consistent across all BizTalk Server databases. For example, when you add a new message box DB to the BizTalk Server, you must explicitly enable TDE on that DB.
| When enabling TDE, you should immediately back up the certificate and the private key associated with the certificate. If the certificate ever becomes unavailable or if you must restore or attach the database on another server, you must have backups of both the certificate and the private key or you will not be able to open the database. The encrypting certificate or asymmetric should be retained even if TDE is no longer enabled on the database. Even though the database is not encrypted, the database encryption key may be retained in the database and may need to be accessed for some operations. |
CautionManaging TDE in BizTalk Server
To enable and disable TDE, backing up the TDE enabled BizTalk Server databases and restoring them see Understanding Transparent Data Encryption (TDE)(http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=195138).
Considerations If a database is being used in database mirroring or log shipping, both databases will be encrypted. The log transactions will be encrypted when sent between them.
| Backup files of databases that have TDE enabled are also encrypted by using the database encryption key. As a result, when you restore these backups, the certificate protecting the database encryption key must be available. This means that in addition to backing up the database, you have to make sure that you maintain backups of the server certificates to prevent data loss. Data loss will result if the certificate is no longer available. For more information, see SQL Server Certificates and Asymmetric Keys (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=210625). |
Monitoring known issues in BizTalk Server
Monitor BizTalk Server is a new SQL Agent job introduced in BizTalk Server 2010. You can run the job to identify any known issues in Management, Message Box, or DTA databases. For more information about the Monitor BizTalk Server job, see Monitoring BizTalk Server.
Customer Experience Improvement Program in BizTalk Server
Microsoft introduces the Customer Experience Improvement Program in BizTalk Server 2010. As part of this support in Beta, you are automatically opted-in to provide useful feedback to Microsoft regarding your usage of BizTalk Server. The data collected from you is anonymous and cannot be used to identify you. Microsoft collects feature usage statistics as part of this program.
By participating in this program, you can help improve the reliability and performance of various features of BizTalk Server. Post BizTalk Server 2010 Beta, you may also choose to opt out of this program. For more information about this program and its privacy policy, see Microsoft BizTalk Server CEIP Privacy Policy(http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=188553).
Updated Platform Support
BizTalk Server 2010 includes support for the following software versions:
- Windows Server 2008 R2
- Windows Server 2008 SP2
- Windows 7
- Windows Vista SP2
- SQL Server 2008 SP1
- SQL Server 2008 R2
- Visual Studio 2010
- Microsoft Office 2007
- Microsoft Office 2010 (x86 only)
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