RE: Biztalk 2006 - load balancing question...

I would take a look at the Planning and Architecture section of our
documentation, particularly the "Planning for High Availability" article:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa558765.aspx

Fault tolerance for the entire BizTalk solution means maintaining high
availability at multiple tiers: the BizTalk processing tier (BizTalk hosts
and ESSO service), the data tier (SQL Service and at the disk subsystem),
and even the endpoints or other systems BizTalk is connecting to or
dependent on. HA at the data tier is easily achieved by using SQL
fail-over clustering. HA of ESSO can be achieved by using Windows
Clustering. HA of the BTS hosts can be achieved for send and orchestration
hosts by simply making sure the hosts have more than one host instance
running within the BizTalk group. Planning HA for BTS receive hosts
depends on the transport that you are using...

If you are using FILE and connecting to say an NTFS share, then the
appropriate locking semantics exist in the protocol to prevent two host
instances from fighting over the same message. However, other protocols do
not have this, such as FTP. For the first type, simply making sure
multiple receive host instances are running in the group will achieve HA.
For the latter, Windows clustering the hosts will have to be done, placing
one host in an active mode and the other in a passive one.

The last point is around ensuring HA of the endpoints themselves, perhaps
webservices or FILE shares. In HTTP or SOAP scenarios customers commonly
use NLB (software load balancing) or a physical load balancing device to
distribute the inbound requests to one or more web server instances. On
each of these web server instances customers may also have a BTS receive
host accepting these requests. I have also seen customers have a
lightweight web service responsible for sending messages to BizTalk hosts
in another tier (separating the web tier from the BizTalk processing tier,
perhaps because of corporate policies restricting the use of BizTalk in the
DMZ). Some use a reverse-proxy to redirect requests back to the BizTalk
tier as well.

Anyway, planning this should be well thought out and depending on the
constraints of your organization and application scenario, there are many
different options to consider. The above article should help considerably.

HTH,
Doug Girard [MSFT]

Note: This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no
rights.
--------------------
From: "Paul" <ecky@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Biztalk 2006 - load balancing question...
Date: Fri, 17 Nov 2006 13:58:54 -0500
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Hi

I've been looking into options for fault tollerence of our Biztalk 2006
implementation. Our first option was to software load balance, but my
understanding is that the software approach will not cater for IIS or the
Biztalk service going down, as long as the server is up, the load balancer
is going to send requests to it.

Is my understanding correct? Would a hardware load balanced solution be
smart enough to handle IIS and/or Biztalk being down?

Thanks in advance




.

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