Windows Server - Scaling out BTS 2006

Asked By scottpe

03-Jul-07 02:44 PM

Hi,

I want to add more BizTalk servers to a solution I am working on. I
have looked at the  documentation and cannot see if there is a maximum
number of servers I can have working in the solution.

I have heard some talking about six servers for all hosts in a
solution, but I did not see that in the docs. Does anyone have any
links to the docs that cover this or have any info about the maximum
number of servers you can have (all divided among various hosts, if
necessary).

Thanks,

Scott

03-Jul-07 04:00 PM

There should not be a maximum number og servers. As long as you ar
eusing Enterprise Edition, everything is ok - Standard Edition does
not support more than one server in a group.

--
eliasen, representing himself and not the company he works for.

Private blog: http://blog.eliasen.dk

Private email: jan@eliasen.dk

03-Jul-07 04:36 PM

I would look at the following doc to understand where Microsoft has gone as
far as expandibility.

http://download.microsoft.com/download/9/9/5/99566887-a7b7-4d13-846a-87d342b6b159/BTS2k6PerformanceLabs.doc

Eric
http://blog.biztalk-info.com

03-Jul-07 06:23 PM

Are you sure that there is no limit on the Enterprise Edition?

I am using Windows Server 2003 EE (Enterprise Edition), SQL Server
2005 EE and BTS 2006 EE. My customer wants to make sure that they
easily add servers in the next couple of months - just want to make
sure I am not steering them down the wrong path. I have not seen
anything at all that covers the number of servers that can be
combined.

Thanks again - Scott

04-Jul-07 02:36 AM

I'm not sure about the maximum number of servers in a group, there shouldn't
be any restriction as Jan mentioned.

I'll just give you an idea of what you can achieve with 4 servers in a
BizTalk group.

I worked in one of the biggest public sector Health Care project processing
around 2000 messages per minute. We had a dedicated performance tuning team,
their primary job is to try different configuration with different hardware,
different versions of OS/SQL (32 bit, 64 bit etc), we also carried out the
test in performance lab in Microsoft Campus, Redmond. At last our production
configuration ended up like this

1. Four BizTalk Servers with 8 processors (in a group)
2. Single SQL Server for message box
3. Single SQL Server for all other BizTalk databases
4. Single SQL Server for our custom database.

SQL and SSO are clustered.

Regards,
Saravana Kumar
http://www.biztalk247.com/v1/
http://www.digitaldeposit.net/blog
[Please mark the response as "Answer" if it solves your problem.]

04-Jul-07 05:38 PM

Yeah..I already have a few servers running and can see that BTS scales
very well.

My customer is seeking a 15-20 times improvement in performance. We
have already trimmed as much as we can from the solution itself and
now feel it is time to scale up. I have since found that some people
are running 40 servers in a group and I think we are going to end up
there too. I just wanted to make sure it was possible since, as I
said, I have seen discussions of a maximum of six servers in a group.

Thanks for all your answers!

Scott