My buddy Ewan’s newest paper on BizTalk and Hyper-V was released a few days ago. I had the opportunity to provide some feedback on the early drafts, and while it’s nice that he mentions me in the acknowledgements, I’m mad at him for outing my not-so-secret employer 🙂 I am now actively searching for secrets of Ewan’s that I can publish to a broad audience. The racier the better.
Anyway, it’s a good paper. Don’t let the 135 pages fool you. It’s not like it takes that much text to explain HOW to deploy BizTalk on Hyper-V. If it did, then Microsoft failed miserably at making something understandable. Rather, all this content focuses on the best practices, upfront considerations, and the results of a comprehensive set of tests run by the Microsoft team. They’ve added a set of checklists that you can use which let you jump straight to the parts that help you deploy and configure BizTalk in the virtual environment.
So who is this for? While the paper boldly claims that this is for “All IT Professionals who work with BizTalk Server”, I’d say that this paper is quite useful to those responsible for estimating costs of new environments (consultants, internal IT orgs), those installing such environments, and system owners responsible for keeping the environment healthy and appropriately sized.
Even if you aren’t using Hyper-V (we aren’t, for example), there is useful information here when trying to figure out the performance cost of virtualization on BizTalk environments and tips for improving that performance.
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