Different ways to install BizTalk360

Published on : Dec 20, 2018

Category : BizTalk360 Update

Sivaramakrishnan

Author

A few days back we have received a question from one of our customer on the possibility to install BizTalk360 on Windows Azure Virtual machine. We have replied with suggestions, and he was impressed by the option what we have provided to install BizTalk360.

That’s the moment of inspiration for this blog. Here, we are going to look at the types of installers available and different ways to install BizTalk360.

I would recommend you to have a look at the prerequisites that should be met to install and work with BizTalk360.

Installing BizTalk360 – What are the options

One of the common questions that customers raise to us. There are various deployment choices available for BizTalk360.

This is one of the common questions we have observed recently on our customer engagements.

The deployments are purely based on the organization needs and based upon the BizTalk environment architecture. Here are the options BizTalk360 provides:

  • Installing BizTalk360 On a BizTalk Server
  • Installing BizTalk360 On a Stand-Alone (non-BizTalk) Server
  • Installing Just the BizTalk360 Monitoring Service
  • Installing Just the BizTalk360 Analytics Service
  • Installing BizTalk360 on High Availability BizTalk Servers

How can you achieve the various deployment options?

If you are installing BizTalk360 for the first time, you can select the components that you wish to install on the server.

Option 1 – Installation on the BizTalk Server environment

You can install BizTalk360 in one of BizTalk Servers of the BizTalk Server environments (production, non-production etc.) and configure all the environments in one BizTalk360 interface.

Option 2 – Installation on a stand-alone server

This is another common scenario where customers don’t want to install BizTalk360 directly on their production environment.

BizTalk360 supports this scenario by allowing customers to install on a standalone server and access various environments. In this case, customers need to install BizTalk administration components (only) in the standalone server. Also, any third-party adapters must be installed on this server.

It is one of our recommendations to install BizTalk360 on a separate box for the customers who don’t want to install in their BizTalk Environment. The benefit is that once your BizTalk server goes down, your BizTalk360 server won’t go down along with it and be able to send notifications about your BizTalk server not being available.

Option 3 – Install Just the BizTalk360 Monitoring Service

The Monitoring Service plays a key role as it is responsible for fetching the status of artifacts from the BizTalk server to monitor them. Using this option, you can install the BizTalk360 Monitoring Service on a separate box and BizTalk360 database on a separate box.

This setup will be helpful in a scenario where the customer wants to have the BizTalk360 web services, user interface (IIS), BizTalk360 Monitoring service and the BizTalk360 Database all in separate boxes.

This setup can also be done when you want the BizTalk360 monitoring service to be in the high availability state. When monitoring service is installed in two servers in the high availability mode, when one service goes down, the other service will be up, where the monitoring of your BizTalk environment by BizTalk360 will be continued without any interruption.

Option 4 – Install Just the BizTalk360 Analytics Service

As like installing BizTalk360 monitoring service on a separate box you can install the BizTalk360 Analytics Service on a separate box as well.

Option 5 – Installing BizTalk360 on High Availability BizTalk Servers

You can install BizTalk360 on BizTalk high availability servers. At the same time, you can make BizTalk360 as a highly available setup.

Installing BizTalk360 on the single server environment is a straightforward task when the BizTalk server and database are existing in the same machine. You can simply run the BizTalk360 MSI from the Administrator Command prompt.

But in most of the cases, we have seen our customers use BizTalk360 in a High Availability mode to make it available all the time.

Different ways to install BizTalk360

To fulfil all the customer needs, there is a number of ways to install BizTalk360 and we provide different types of installer options:

  1. Default installation
  2. Silent Installation
  3. Azure Marketplace installer
  4. Azure easy installer

Default installation

The Default installation is the regular way of installing BizTalk360.

Once you have created and configured a machine with all the prerequisites met, download the latest version of BizTalk360 (.msi) and install it on the machine.

In which case will this be helpful?

When you have a physical/virtual server within an organization which may have or have not internet connectivity.

You can achieve all the various deployment choices,

  • Installing BizTalk360 on a BizTalk Server
  • Installing BizTalk360 on a Stand-Alone (non-BizTalk) Server
  • Just the BizTalk360 Monitoring Service
  • Just the BizTalk360 Analytics Service
  • BizTalk360 on High Availability BizTalk Servers

You can download the latest version installer of BizTalk360 from http://www.biztalk360.com/free-trial/ . You must enter the registration information in the form before downloading the BizTalk360 MSI.

Silent Installation

This is one of the interesting cases which came to us. One of our customers was trying to install BizTalk360. Although he was from Admin team, he was not a member of the BizTalk groups.

He proposed a request that is there any option to install BizTalk360 without the installer user interface or screen. We do have Silent installation support.

So, we assisted the customer with the command which they need to run the installer without the installer GUI. But with the silent installation, you can’t achieve all the various deployment choices as seen with the regular installation (Refer the section “Default Installation -> In which case it will be helpful”).

Azure easy installer

The move to the cloud eventually means that customers using BizTalk360 for managing and monitoring their BizTalk server environments will need their BizTalk360 setup to run on their Azure setup. Without BizTalk360 on their Azure setup, the only way for customers to manage their BizTalk environment (running on Azure) is by physically logging into the server through RDP connection.

Also, there is a challenge with the number of RDP connections (no. of users) who can access the server at a time. Therefore, the presence of BizTalk360 becomes an important factor – be it in an on-premise setup or on a remote server (Azure).

In which case will this be helpful?

 Any server which has BizTalk Server installed, with the help of BizTalk360 Azure Easy Installer, you can easily install BizTalk360 by executing a single PowerShell command on your BizTalk Server Machine.

Why did we introduce this?

As the technology and usability evolve, we would like to encourage customers who are already using BizTalk server in Azure, to move their BizTalk360 environment to the cloud as well.

The customers using BizTalk360 for managing and monitoring their BizTalk server environments in Azure will need their BizTalk360 setup to run on their Azure setup as well.

How easy to use is it?

With the BizTalk360 Azure Easy Installer, you can easily install BizTalk360 by executing a single PowerShell command on your BizTalk Machine. The installer will take care right from the scratch of creating a service account for BizTalk360, configuring the BizTalk server (optional), enabling HTTP feature, granting SQL permissions and IIS.

Azure Marketplace installer

This is helpful for customers having a Microsoft Azure account and provisioned BizTalk server machines in the cloud with a more complex setup such as a domain, Active Directory, and one or more BizTalk environments in the network.

With BizTalk360 in Azure, you get a complete deployment that can target your BizTalk environment running on-premise via VPN or ExpressRoute or on Azure IaaS Platform.

In which case it will be helpful?

With the help of BizTalk360’s Azure Marketplace installer, you can simply spin up and add a new BizTalk360 machine into your existing BizTalk environment. We support BizTalk Server 2013R2 and 2016.

Why did we introduce this?

To ease the installation process, where the customer has the BizTalk server setup in domain Azure architecture, this tool will be very helpful. In any architecture, to add a new application software will be a difficult job because so many changes need to be done right from the providing permission to other prerequisites.

Likewise, to install BizTalk360, set of prerequisites must be performed before installing. To make this job easier for the users, our Azure marketplace installer comes into the picture.

How easy to use is it?

While adding a new machine for BizTalk360, select new Virtual machine in the Marketplace and select the image according to your existing environment. As of now, we are providing support for BizTalk server 2013 R2 and BizTalk 2016.

It is just a simple process; once after the creation of the new BizTalk360 Virtual machine, the Azure Marketplace installer will be opened. Just providing the credentials, it will be added to the domain (the machine will be automatically restarted as a part of this process), and BizTalk360 installation will continue.

Upon successful completion, BizTalk360 will be installed and you will notice a browser window firing open with the BizTalk360 screen. We want to convey that using the BizTalk360’s Azure Marketplace installer, and the Azure easy installer is free of costs.

Conclusion

Keeping the user perspective in mind, we have built various deployment choices for BizTalk360 customers which would ease the installation and provide a user-friendly experience.