Configure your BizTalk applications to run under seperate Host with Click of a button?

UPDATE: Full source code of this project is now available at CodePlex. Project URL http://www.codeplex.com/BizTalkAppHostConfig Companies use BizTalk Server in a variety of configurations. Let’s see this scenario: Scenario: Company-X is a medium sized company they got variety of small BizTalk applications like “Order Processing”, “Payroll Processing”, “Payment Processing” etc. But they only have one BizTalk infrastructure (they got replica setting for testing and production) with 2 BizTalk application servers (BizTalk group) connected to 2 SQL servers clustered. All their BizTalk applications are deployed in this BizTalk group. All the applications are configured to run within the default In-Process and Isolated host and one instance per host is created on both the application servers. The main issues with the above scenario are:

• Every time a new application is deployed or existing application is upgraded the host instances needs to be restarted (to refresh cached components). Stopping or restarting the host instance is going to affect each and every deployed application. At the minimum none of the applications are going to process any messages during the upgrade process.
• Security can be compromised, because there is no security boundary between applications.
• If one application causes problem to the host instance it’s going to affect the overall system.

The solution to the above mentioned problems is to create separate logical hosts for each application and then creating corresponding host instances. Logical hosts can be created for BizTalk application using variety of tools that comes out of the box like BizTalk administration console, WMI, etc, but we’ll face the following issues

1. A thorough understanding of the host and host instances concept is required for the person who is performing the task.
2. Creating logical host and configuring the BizTalk artifacts manually (handlers, receive locations, send ports and orchestrations) are error prone.
3. Managing multiple logical hosts and their corresponding configuration will become more difficult over time.

ApplicationHostCreator is designed to create and manage logical hosts for BizTalk applications seamlessly to support situations as described in the above scenario. Read more about how to use the tool and download version 1.0 of the tool at http://www.biztalk247.com LINK: http://www.biztalk247.com/v1/articles/appHostCreator.aspx Nandri! Saravana