It’s also a good practice to run MBV periodically in your environment (once a week for example) and take action on some of the critical and non-critical errors it reports. MBV comes with over 400 rules to verify various things in your environment. BizTalk360 comes with first class integration for MBV out of the box, with complete scheduling and alerting mechanism.

The main reason for this post it to inform readers, MBV 13 is now part of BizTalk Server 2013 standard installation. If you are using BizTalk Server 2013, it’s already installed on your installation directory. You can find MBV under  C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2013\SDK\Utilities\Support Tools\MsgBoxViewer

For those of you who wants to use the new Message Box Viewer 13 with older versions of BizTalk Server (2010, 2009, 2006 R2 etc),  you can download it directly from JP’s blog here

http://blogs.technet.com/b/jpierauc/archive/2007/12/18/msgboxviewer.aspx

The post Message Box Viewer 13 included in BizTalk Server 2013 appeared first on BizTalk360 Blog.

Initially I was not really looking forward for this trip. There is going to be lot of travel, staying in new places and flying out pretty much every night. But it eventually ended up as one of my best official/social travel experience. It’s kind of an eye opener to understand the culture and life style of living in US to some extend. Just a word of caution, this is not going to be technical, more of my diary about the week.

LHR to CLT, May 5th

My flight was at 7am in the morning from Heathrow to Charlotte via Chicago. I didn’t realize I booked such an early morning flight, the airport is roughly an hours drive or train journey from my place. That means I should start roughly about 4am to reach the airport at 5am. There were no early morning trains and I was not sure whether taxi will be available such early on a Sunday morning. Called my regular cab driver Colin, and he happily accepted to come and drop me at that time. I didn’t have enough sleep on Saturday night, just preparing to make sure everything is in place while I’m going to be away. I slept for an hour during the taxi drive.

The flight was on time and I reached Chicago. During the journey I completed reading the book "To Sell is human, by Daniel H. Pink" I normally don’t transfer in US, in the past I missed my connections twice due to strict immigration. This time I didn’t have a choice, since there are no direct flights to Charlotte. As soon as I landed I rushed through the queue, and luckily cleared the immigration in 20 minutes. I had roughly 2 hours waiting time in Chicago, I picked up a new book "Lean In, by Sheryl Sandberg" from the airport.

There were no problems with the flight and I reached Charlotte by roughly 4:30pm local time. Michael Stephenson and Tord Glad Nordahl were there already, Kent Weare and his friend Luciano joined us bit later. We had some interesting talks, few drinks. Michael, Tord and me decided to go to the cinema near by and watched Oblivion. It was really good movie, but due to lack of sleep previous day, I was pretty much half-asleep during the show.

Microsoft BizTalk Boot Camp, Charlotte, NC – May 6th

We took the shuttle to Microsoft Charlotte office, roughly 10 minutes drive from the hotel. Mandi Ohlinger (who is currently working as Technical writer for BizTalk Server and Windows Azure) is the main person who arranged the event. I know Mandi very well for few years now, and we are in constant touch throughout the year discussing about MSDN BizTalk Developer centre, BizTalk Documentation content, problems in the field etc.  I had great opportunity to meet lot of people from various parts of the world. I have known some of them virtually for many years through blogs, emails etc and this event gave me the opportunity to meet them in person.

Kent Weare presented an interesting topic about BizTalk2013 and Cloud proposition, show casing some of the new adapters that shipped with BizTalk 2013. He put a very interesting demo utilizing BizTalk, Service Bus, SAP system, Windows 8 application with Notification Hub show casing the real potential of what you can achieve joining all these technologies together.

Michael Shea from Microsoft, based in Charlotte who currently work as PM for some of the BizTalk diagnostics tools like Terminator, MBV, PTracePlus etc demonstrated some of the capabilities of BizTalk Azure VM’s (IaaS). Instead of the normal demonstrations using the Azure management portal, he showcased creating and managing BizTalk VM’s using PowerShell, and there as a lab exercise during the day.

Todd Uhl who currently works as premier field engineer (PFE) for Microsoft wrapped up the day with an interesting session about various tools (Message Box Viewer, PAL, etc) they use on the field at customers site. I was very pleased to hear Todd mentioning about BizTalk360 few times during his talk.

Finally we wrapped up the day with party at Mac’s speed shop, great opportunity to get together with lot of people in BizTalk area, understanding the way they use the product, use cases etc. I absolutely love talking to people, knowing their pain points and see if we can address some of them in BizTalk360.

Microsoft BizTalk Boot Camp, Charlotte, NC – May 7th

Tord Glad Nordahl started the day with his famous BizTalk Throttling presentation, followed by another presentation on BizTalk Tracking. Both the session were well respected and audience were very engaged and lot of conversations during the talk.

Michael Stephenson followed Tord, with his presentation about various methodologies you can use to test your BizTalk applications. He introduced some interesting concepts like using Spec Flow and Fakes framework for BizTalk Testing.

I followed Micael Stephenson, demonstrating some of the capabilities of BizTalk360 and how customers can take advantage and increase their management/monitoring efficiency.

After lunch, Mandi Ohlinger demonstrated some of the new stuff that’s going to be released as part of Azure/BizTalk, most of her talk were under NDA and you’ll hear more about it from Microsoft in few months time.

Finally to close of the Boot Camp, we had a Q&A session having Kent Weare, Michael Stephenson, Mandi Ohlinger, Tord Glad Nordahl and Michael Shea

That evening I flew to Dallas for my following day presentation.

BizTalk Server Partner Road Show, Dallas – May 8th

There is lot of momentum at the moment in the BizTalk server space, everyone is so excited about the new release of BizTalk Server 2013. We partnered with Neudesic and QuickLearn in US to do series of BizTalk Server road shows and as part of that I was in Dallas presenting a session on BizTalk360.

Eric Leaseburg from Neudesic (previously Microsoft) presented the introduction and what’s new in BizTalk Server 2013 session. If in search of Eric’s name, you’ll find references going all the way back to BizTalk Server 2004.

Sergio Compean from Neudesic followed Eric with his session on some of the new Azure/BizTalk stuff, most of them are under NDA. They put together a nice demo showcasing some of the power of what’s going to come in the platform.

I presented BizTalk360 to the audience showcasing the benefits and how customers can enhance the value of their BizTalk Server investment. There were lot of interest in the product, even some of our partners are surprised by the amount of stuff we covered in BizTalk360. For us it’s great advantage to mingle with the people and always get some valuable feedback for the product.

John Gallaway followed my presentation showing importance of having a good BizTalk training.

After the event we had lunch with Neudesic Dallas team, I had my flight to Huston in the evening. John Gallaway from QuickLearn was also heading to Houston and he was going to drive. He offered me to join him on the road trip. I never been on long distance road travel in US, so I decided to travel along with John. It was about 4 hours drive and we discussed lot of things during our travel, mostly tech related, and also about various things like National Highways, the numbering system, Truck drivers, etc. It was very interesting conversation. We reached Houston around 6pm and I took the taxi to stay with one of my close friend Abhilash Shanmugan (ex BizTalk Server MVP and now Regional Director for Neudesic – Connected Systems in Houston) and his family.

BizTalk Server Partner Road Show, Houston- May 9th

Abhilash Shanmugan did the first presentation on What’s new in BizTalk Server 2013 with some new views on Azure Service Bus offering and some use cases for these technology to work together to make some hybrid on-premise and cloud stuff to work together. He answered lot of the questions raised by audience. Very engaging audience and quite deep conversations.

Balaji Laxman and Shankar followed Abhi, with the demonstration showing some of the new Azure/BizTalk stuff that’s coming in few months time. Most of their content are under NDA and the audience had the privilege to look into some of the internal stuff that’s coming soon.  They put together some nice demos showing some near real world use cases for the technology.

I did the presentation highlighting the power of BizTalk360, how the current challenges faced by BizTalk server customers can be addressed using BizTalk360. I demonstrated how you can setup monitoring for your environment in less than 10 minutes using BizTalk360.

At this point my official trip is over, I decided to spend rest of the week in US with my close friend from my school days who is living in Austin. He picked me up from Houston and we drove all the way to Austin that afternoon and reached around 7 pm.

Austin Trip, May 10 -12

We present BizTalk360 in various countries across the world and whenever we visit a country I personally make it a habit to stay bit longer and explore the country. I also use it as a re-energising technique to boost your energy before you come back to work.

One of the great things about BizTalk MVP community is, we are all very close. Stephen Thomas (BizTalkGurus.com) lives in Austin along with his wife and son and we arranged to meet up for dinner during my stay. I introduced my close school friend Pradip and his family to Stephen Thomas family and we had an excellent time together at Austin.

On Sunday I flew back to London, Stephen Thomas was on the plane with my till Dallas and he headed to NYC for his regular work and I came to UK the following morning.

It was such a great experience meeting various people, various places  (I never been to any of the cities I visited this time before), making new friends, meeting virtual friends, etc. I’m glad some time writing this, I can revisit it in the future and walk through the memory lane.

The post BizTalk360 US Road show experience appeared first on BizTalk360 Blog.

There were some interesting articles about the event

• Our experience organising BizTalk Summit London – 2013
• BizTalk Summit 2013 – London. The story of the day

The event was big success with 128 attendees from 72 companies across 15 countries +  11 speakers from Microsoft Integration MVP and Microsoft BizTalk Server product group. We recorded the event for those of you who didn’t get a chance to attend the event in person. The first set of videos were released back in February.

We couldn’t release the keynote videos that time, since there were some NDA material that could not be revealed to mass audience until the launch of BizTalk Server 2013. Now BizTalk Server 2013 is generally available (since 1st of April) and hence we worked with the video production team this month and video is now available for public.

We also created the complete English transcript of the video for those of you who prefer to read rather than watch the video.

The post BizTalk Summit 2013, London – Keynote Video appeared first on BizTalk360 Blog.

BizTalk Boot Camp is a free 2 days technical event conducted by Microsoft to focus on some of the new offering in Microsoft BizTalk Server 2013, Windows Azure BizTalk Services and BizTalk server in VM Role (Azure IaaS). In these 2 days, attendees will learn some of the advanced topics like

• BizTalk Server throttling
• BizTalk Server messaging, including databases and tracking
• BizTalk Server Diagnostics and troubleshooting
• New cloud-based BizTalk Server adapters
• Windows Azure BizTalk Services EDI and the new portal
• Windows Azure BizTalk Services hybrid applications with on-premise Line Of Business (LOB) systems
• Configuring a BizTalk virtual machine in the VM Role

The sessions will be delivered by some of the Integration MVP’s and Microsoft product group members. This is an in-person event and requires an NDA to sign.  Registration link

May 8th: BizTalk Server Partner Road show, Dallas

BizTalk360 is partnering with Neudesic (one of the top consulting companies in US) and QuickLearn to conduct series of in person partner road shows across various cities in US.  The first leg of the journey will be in Dallas and Houston

The main objectives of the event will be to show some of the new capabilities that’s introduced in BizTalk Server 2013, Azure BizTalk Services, building hybrid solutions, and understanding the capabilities of BizTalk360.  Here are some of the topics that will be discussed.

• Connect and automate existing assets to maximize the value of your IT portfolio.
• Increase agility and reduce your TCO by leveraging the cloud and hybrid-cloud.
• Enhance productivity by bridging the gap between your data center and employees.
• Deliver innovative applications that integrate with new and existing assets.
• Extract, report, analyse, publish and share information company-wide, in real time.
• Extend LOB applications securely beyond traditional network boundaries.

Registration Link

May 9th: BizTalk Server Partner Road show, Houston

This is basically the repeat of the Dallas event. Registration Link

The post BizTalk360 Tour of America appeared first on BizTalk360 Blog.

BizTalk360 is becoming more and more mainstream when it comes to Microsoft BizTalk server administrations, operations and monitoring. We started to hear feedbacks like employers are looking for BizTalk360 skills in addition to BizTalk server skills and on the other hand candidates mentioning BizTalk360 as one of the core skill sets in their resumes. In order to streamline the process we are introducing "BizTalk360 – Product Specialist" program. The primary objective of the program is to honour individuals who have gained adequate knowledge in installing, configuring and implementing BizTalk360 solution at customer sites.

How to obtain

Currently the only way to obtain the "product specialist" title is by proving your history of implementation details. You must have at least implemented BizTalk360 in two different customer places. We have history of people who worked with us closely on different customer engagements, we will be rewarding them based on our communications with them. If you think you are eligible, please get in touch with us.

Recognition

People who are recognised as "BizTalk360 – Product Specialist" will be highlighted in our official (http://www.biztalk360.com ) web site. You are also allowed to use the "Product Specialist" batch on your blogs, LinkedIn profile, etc. showcasing yourself as a leader when it comes to BizTalk server operations/monitoring/administration using BizTalk360. Verified profiles will be available on our website.

Program Benefits

• Free licenses for your developer environment.
• Involvement in product development.
• First-hand look at Beta programs – you will be able to get the alphas, betas and pre-release builds before anyone else.
• Direct communication channel with our product teams, you will have a chance to get to know the people that stand behind BizTalk360 and communicate directly with them.
• Personal blog and spotlight posted on our website.
• "Product Specialist" SWAG packages sent to you twice a year with all kinds of awesome goodies.

The post Introducing BizTalk360 Product Specialist appeared first on BizTalk360 Blog.

There are lot of blog post out there explaining how you can do the switch, but most of them have lot of explanation and it’s hard to just look at the PowerShell commands required to do the switch. I recently had to switch the server between these various modes for testing BizTalk360 compatibility. Here is the list of commands I just kept in notepad to make my life easy.

Full to MinShell
Import-Module ServerManager
Uninstall-WindowsFeature Server-Gui-Shell -Restart

MinShell to Server Core
Import-Module ServerManager
Uninstall-Windowsfeature Server-Gui-Mgmt-Infra -Restart

Server Core to MinShell
start powershell
Import-Module ServerManager
Install-Windowsfeature Server-Gui-Mgmt-Infra -Restart

MinShell to Full
Import-Module ServerManager
install-WindowsFeature Server-Gui-Shell -Restart

Full to Server Core
Import-Module ServerManager
Uninstall-WindowsFeature Server-Gui-Shell
Uninstall-Windowsfeature Server-Gui-Mgmt-Infra -Restart

Server Core to Full
start powershell
Import-Module ServerManager
install-Windowsfeature Server-Gui-Mgmt-Infra
install-WindowsFeature Server-Gui-Shell -Restart

The post Windows Server 2012, switching between full, min shell and server core appeared first on BizTalk360 Blog.

Failed to create ‘WCF-SQL’ Transport Component
Microsoft.BizTalk.ExplorerOM.BtsException: Failed to create ‘WCF-SQL’ Transport Component
   at Microsoft.BizTalk.ExplorerOM.BtsCatalogExplorer.SaveChangesWithTransaction(Object transactionObj)
   at Microsoft.BizTalk.ExplorerOM.BtsCatalogExplorer.SaveChanges()

We asked the customer to try the same actions using BizTalk administration console and they reported same issue. The customer has gone down our standalone server deployment, where you install BizTalk360 on an external standalone server (not in any of your existing BizTalk servers ). The pre-requisite for this type of deployment is to install only BizTalk Admin components  (not the full run-time) before installing BizTalk360.

We couldn’t find the issue and finally we raised a Microsoft PSS support call. After couple of days back and forth conference call and help of one of the PSS support staff (Yakshit Gohel), they finally figured out it’s a bug in BizTalk admin only installation.

Cause

The main cause for this issue is due to the dependency on one of the run-time dll’s  (Microsoft.BizTalk.Adapter.WCF.Runtime.dll) that gets installed only when you install all the components of BizTalk Server. Since in our case we only installed BizTalk Admin components, that dll was missing in the server and hence the error.

Resolution

One option is to install the full version of BizTalk runtime in the standalone server. We couldn’t do it because it has licensing implication. BizTalk admin components can be installed in any server without any license restriction. But if you install the full version, then that server needs to be licensed.

The second option is to go through the following procedure to fix the issue.

1. Get the same dll (Microsoft.BizTalk.Adapter.WCF.Runtime.dll) from a machine where BizTalk runtime is installed.
2. GAC this dll in the machine where we are facing the problem.
3. Install BizTalk adapter pack 32-bit & 64-bit (if not installed)
4. Run the following commands from the command prompt from this path (c:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft BizTalk Adapter Pack\bin)
5. CustomAction.exe -ib sql 5 31bf3856ad364e35 -> to register the WCF-SQL adapter
6. CustomAction.exe -ib db 5 31bf3856ad364e35 -> to register the WCF-Oracle adapter
7. CustomAction.exe -ib sap 5 31bf3856ad364e35 -> to register WCF-SAP adapter
8. Open the BizTalk MMC. You should be able to enable or disable the receive location now.

Other adapter effected

You’ll experience the same issue for some of the other WCF adapters (WCF-Oracle and WCF-SAP). The above steps should fix the problem. Also note the other reason you might see this error is, if you haven’t installed the WCF LOB adapters on the standalone server (both 32 bit and 64 bit versions)

The post BizTalk Admin only installation bug : Failed to create WCF-SQL Transport Component appeared first on BizTalk360 Blog.

There are few options available for you to monitor your BizTalk environments. Most of the popular enterprise wide monitoring solutions comes with some kind of management pack, smart plugins, add-on etc. to monitor your BizTalk environments. When it comes to BizTalk Server the two most popular monitoring solutions available in the market are Microsoft System Center Operations Manager – SCOM (with BizTalk management pack) and BizTalk360.

BizTalk360 is not competing with SCOM (or any general purpose monitoring solutions), it’s sole purpose is to focus 100% on monitoring only BizTalk solutions (applications and supporting infrastructure). It’s objective is to make it easy and accessible to configure and manage monitoring BizTalk environments.

It could be confusing for people to compare and contrast the benefits of both the products. There are strengths and weaknesses on each product. It’s important for you to understand it and make a conscious decision of which is the right product for your requirements. Kent Weare has done an excellent job in writing a white paper which just does that. You can download the white paper here.

BizTalk Monitoring Solutions white paper by Kent Weare

Kent Weare is one of the recognized industry expert in BizTalk Server area. He has recently co-authored two BizTalk Server books: (MCTS): Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010 (70-595) Certification Guide and Microsoft BizTalk 2010: Line of Business Systems Integration. For the past six consecutive years he has been recognized by Microsoft as a BizTalk, and more recently Integration, MVP (Most Valuable Professional). Kent is also a co-author of the BizTalk Server 2010 Administrator Training Kit where he was responsible for developing and delivering the BizTalk Management Pack for System Center module.

In August 2010, Kent travelled to Stockholm, Sweden where he gave a presentation to the Swedish BizTalk User group on how you can monitor your BizTalk environment using System Centre Operations Manager. You can watch the video he presented here "Monitoring your BizTalk Environment using SCOM".

In October 2011, Kent Weare was part of a successful implementation of BizTalk360 at a Power Distribution company in Canada.  At this particular organization, they use both SCOM and BizTalk360 to deliver end to end monitoring of  their business.  You can read more about this implementation here "Adding BizTalk360 to your Environment".

From his profile it’s very clear Kent is one of those experts who has deep knowledge and understanding of both SCOM and BizTalk360 and have hands on experience using them in the real world scenario. Kent has spent last 6 weeks of his spare time working on this white paper comparing and contrasting the strengths and weaknesses of both the products, when to use what, a simple summary report showcasing the feature mapping etc. Below diagram is one such information from the white paper.

We wanted to thank Kent Weare for taking such an effort to clarify the confusions around BizTalk server monitoring and making life easy for people who are in a position looking for a monitoring solution for your BizTalk environment. We also wanted to thank Steef-Jan Wiggers who helped Kent as a technical contributor to the document. Steef-Jan have similar experience to Kent and he has also implemented both SCOM and BizTalk360 in few of his customer consulting engagements in Netherlands.

Download the white paper

You can download the white paper here

The post BizTalk Monitoring Solutions (SCOM vs BizTalk360) white paper by Kent Weare appeared first on BizTalk360 Blog.

BizTalk is not a standalone product, it got various other core dependencies with other Microsoft products for it’s normal functioning. The following is the list of those dependencies.

• .NET Framework
• Visual Studio
• SQL Server, and
• Windows (client/server)
• Office (for BAM scenarios)
• System Centre (for monitoring)

All the above technology constantly evolve and moving forward consistently,  and it’s always mandatory for the BizTalk product group to keep up with the phase and do platform alignment in every release. The above ones are only related to Microsoft technologies, but also need to bear in mind, BizTalk Server is a middle ware platform and it integrates with various other things like SAP, Oracle, etc. and also various standard like SWIFT, HL7, HIPAA etc. they all evolve with various versions and it’s pretty hard task to keep up with all the industry standard.

Sometime people take it for granted and underestimate the importance of the keyword "Platform alignment". In addition to the major releases, Microsoft also released various service packs and cummulative updates in between major releases to address bugs and bring some new capabilities.

Here is the complete list of BizTalk Server versions, their internal BizTalk Server version number and the release date. It includes all the cumulative updates and service packs.

Just for fun we added a nice Infographic to showcase the platform alignment since 2004.

The post The Evolution of BizTalk Server appeared first on BizTalk360 Blog.

Original Article Link: http://blogs.biztalk360.com

With BizTalk Server 2013, Microsoft is moving to a per-core licensing model to keep BizTalk Licensing consistent with SQL Server licensing. The licensing changes are critical, because in the recent years the way hardware is been evolved was quite dramatic. Until now BizTalk licensing is pretty much unchanged since 2004 version, back in those days servers typically had dual core and quad core processors. But these days 256 core processors exists  and it’s bit insane to just buy one BizTalk server license for that 256 core processor.  Oracle and IBM use similar matrix called "Oracle Processor Core factor" and the "IBM Processor Value Unit tables"

What is a core?

First let’s understand this buzz word "Core", what is a core? There are two important aspects to a processor, a physical processor (socket) as shown in the below picture that connects directly to your computer mother board.

and within that single physical processor there will be multiple cores of processors. Example: As shown in the below picture, you can purchase processors ranging from single core, dual core, quad core, hex core, octa core etc.. A computer (server) can also have more than one physical processors present, each physical processor in turn can have multiple cores ( dual, quad, hex, octa etc)

What was the licensing model until BizTalk Server 2010?

Until BizTalk Server 2010 the licensing was very straight forward, you buy processor license based on number of physical processors (socket) present in the server, completely ignoring the number of cores present in each of those physical processors. Example if you have a server with 1 CPU and a server with 4 Physical CPU’s

	Only 1 CPU license required(ex: $40k), in spite of the number of cores in each processor.
	4 CPU licenses required (ex: $40 * 4 = $160k), in spite of the number of cores in each processor.

You can see the problem here, let’s assume from the above picture ( 4 physical processor scenario), each physical processor is a dual core CPU. The actual power of the server is 4*2 = 8 processors. If the customer is clever and understand the licensing model correctly, they would have bought a server with either 2 * quad core, or even 1 * Octo core bringing the pricing down from $160k to $80k or even $40k respectively but having pretty much same level of processing power without any compromise (may be little bit).

In the past lot of consultants (including me) have done exactly this for our customers, recommending to buy physical CPU’s with high number of processor cores to reduce the BizTalk server licensing cost, in a completely legitimate way.

What is the licensing model from BizTalk Server 2013?

SQL Server suffered from exactly same problem we discussed in the previous section and as part of SQL Server 2012 release they changed the licensing model to per core pricing. BizTalk Server 2013 which is releasing roughly a year latter is following the foot steps of SQL and switching to per core licensing model. Lets explore bit more in detail.

Publicly advertised pricing

* Pricing subject to change.

Here are key points to consider while licensing a physical server:

• You must license all the cores in the server
• Minimum of 4 core licenses required (if your server has less than 4 cores, ex: single core and dual core machines)
• Licenses can be purchased in pack of two.
• Processor Cores are priced at 1/4 the cost of BizTalk 2010 processor license. BizTalk 2010 processor license was around $44,000, the new core license is $10,835. So if you are licensing a server with only quad core processor present, then the pricing is identical to BizTalk 2010 pricing.
• Actual number of core licenses required may vary based on processor type and core factor. Let’s see that in detail in next paragraph.

Calculate the number of core licenses required for Physical Server

There are 2 main factors you need to consider while calculating the number of core licenses required for a physical server.

1. Number of cores in the server
2. Core factor for the processor type

Identifying number of processors/cores in your server

The simple and straight forward way to identify the number of processors in the sever is by executing msinfo32.exe from your command prompt, which will list count of physical processors, physical cores and logical cores as shown in the below picture

In the above picture there are 8 logical processors because hyper threading is enabled on this machine (4*2). Hyper threading is not relevant for physical server licensing. But it will impact when you are licensing your virtual environment (individual VM’s licensing). We will cover it bit later.

Identifying the processor type and core factor

You can use the same technique as above by running msinfo32.exe command and check the system type to verify what type of processor you are running. The next step is to use the following core factor table to calculate the actual number of core licenses you require for the processor type.

Lets see this with a concrete example. In the below pictures we have 2 physical servers, each containing 2 Hex Core processors, the first server is equipped with Intel Xeon processors and the second server is equipped with AMD Opteron processors. At the face of it, they both may look like identical configuration, but Microsoft deemed certain AMD processors to be less powerful than the Intel processors. This is where the core factor of processor type comes into picture.

Intel Server: 12 * 1 = 12 core licenses required (since the core factor is 1)

AMD Server: 12 * .75 = 9 core licenses required (since the core factor is .75)

So based on the calculation, if we compare the new 2013 pricing with the old 2010 pricing, it will look as shown below.

There are couple of important things to be noticed.

• Hyper threading is never considered for physical servers.
• Core table is only used for physical servers. For virtual servers, don’t confuse with core table. We will cover virtualizing in later part of the article.

Based on the explanations above, the new "Per Core licensing model", the net price impact to individual customers will vary based on how they deploy BizTalk Server 2013, their current capacity, and their future needs. For customers who are running BizTalk Server software on processors with four cores or less, the license cost for BizTalk Server 2013 remains consistent with BizTalk Server 2010, as core licenses are priced at one quarter the cost of a processor license. For customers running servers with higher capacity processors, licensing cost will grow with the increased power of their hardware.

Licensing Virtual Environments

BizTalk Server 2013 offers expanded virtualization rights, options and benefits to provide greater flexibility when deploying in virtual environments. When deploying BizTalk Server 2013 in a virtual environment, you have the choice of licensing either individual virtual machines as needed or to license for maximum virtualization to support highly virtualized and private cloud environments.

Individual Virtual Machines

As server hardware gets more powerful, it will become more common to use a fraction of the server’s computing power to create new BizTalk servers VM’s. As shown in the below picture, you’ll have a powerful host machine running multiple VM’s (SQL, Web, CMS etc) and you’ll provision one or more BizTalk Servers.

In this case since you are not utilizing all the processors in the physical host server for creating BizTalk virtual machines (VM’s), you only need to license the logical core processors utilized by BizTalk VM’s. Basically you need to buy core license for each virtual core allocated to the virtual machine (minimum of 4 core licenses per VM).  In the above case for "BizTalk VM #1" you would have bought 4 core licenses, since minimum of 4 core licenses are required (even though you only have 2 cores allocated) and for the second VM "BizTalk VM #2" you would have bough 4 core licenses.

Each licensed VM that is covered with Software Assurance (SA) can be moved frequently within a server farm or to a third party hosting provider or cloud services provider without buying additional BizTalk Server licenses.

Maximum Virtualization

For customer who want to take advantage of full computing power of the physical host server and have very dynamic provisioning and de-provisioning of virtual resources further savings can be achieved by licensing all the cores in the physical host server. Once all the cores are licensed, then customers will be able to deploy an unlimited number of virtual machines on the server and utilize the full capacity of the licensed hardware.

Example: Imagine you have bunch of test BizTalk environments in your organisation like SIT, UAT, Staging, Pre-production, Emergency Bug Fix etc., then it will be much simpler option to license all the cores in the physical host server and create as many virtual test environments as required on that particular server. In the below setup, if you have purchased 16 core licenses for all the processors in the physical host server you can provision  BizTalk VM’s in various different ways

Example #1:

Example #2:

In the above scenario if you have enabled Hyper-threading in the physical server, then you’ll have 32 logical cores instead of 16. It could be an option if you want to more BizTalk environment  isolate from each other but not really worried about performance. Once your physical cores are fully licensed then it’s worth taking advantage of Hyper-threading.

Hyper-threading on a individual virtual machine licensing may not be a good option, since you may be paying more for the less processing power.

Virtualization, Hyper-Threading and License impact

When you are licensing all the cores in the physical server then there is no licensing impact with Hyper-Threading. But when you are licensing VM’s you need to pay attention to the Hyper-Threading.

In a virtualized environment, the compute capacity limit is based on the number of logical processors – not cores, because the processor architecture is not visible to the guest applications. For example, a server with four sockets populated with quad-core processors and the ability to enable two hyper-threads per core contains 32 logical processors with hyper-threading enabled but only 16 logical processors with hyper-threading disabled. These logical processors can be mapped to virtual machines on the server with the virtual machines compute load on that logical processor mapped into a thread of execution on the physical processor in the host server.

Typically Hyper threaded processors or not like of like power compared to core processors, So you may want to disable hyper-threading when the performance per virtual processor is important. One can enable or disable hyper-threading using a BIOS setting for the processor during the BIOS setup, but it is typically a server scoped operation that will impact all workloads running on the server.

Maintain a licensing spread sheet for all your resources

Now the licensing model is getting bit more intense and it’s worth keeping a note of all your resources, servers,  processors, cores, etc. in a simple spread sheet like this.

You can download the BizTalk Server 2013 – License Maintenance spread sheet here.

Conclusion

We still didn’t cover certain areas in this document, which we may revisit in the future. Example: Not explaining in detail about the Standard license cost. Software assurance, Enterprise Agreement, EAP etc.

References:

This articles is been written based on various inputs, through direct contact with Microsoft product group, the contents they provided, publicly available content and also analysing SQL server licensing changes. Here are the few articles we referenced

• BizTalk Server 2013 Licensing Datasheet and FAQ
• SQL Server 2012 Core Factor Table
• Introduction to Per Core Licensing

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