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BizTalk 2009 beta shows off ALM support, failover clustering


By David Worthington
December 11, 2008 — 
Microsoft says that the next version of BizTalk Server is on schedule, and a public beta indicates that the company will deliver promised functionality, an analyst says. With this release, Microsoft is building on its 2008 wave of server infrastructure products to provide for application life-cycle management, added connectivity, failover clustering and virtualization. BizTalk's support of RFID technologies has been expanded as well.

The public beta of BizTalk Server 2009 became generally available on Monday. The final version is due out in the first half of 2009, according to Microsoft.

BizTalk Server 2009 integrates with Visual Studio Team System 2008 and Team Foundation Server. Developers can now take the same practices and methodologies that they use for .NET development and apply them to BizTalk artifacts, said Burley Kawasaki, director of product management in the company’s Connected Systems Division.

Developers can use a single set of processes for automating builds, bug tracking, Project Server integration, source control and team development support, he explained.

BizTalk's host and mainframe integration capabilities were also upgraded to expose IBM Customer Information Control System and Information Management System mainframe applications as Windows Communication Foundation services. BizTalk also integrates with IBM's DB2, DB2/400, DB2 Universal Database and WebSphere MQ, in addition to Oracle’s E-Business Suite.

Further, Microsoft is updating BizTalk's Electronic Data Interchange and SWIFT protocol implementations, Kawasaki said. It has also added Universal Description, Discovery and Integration 3, a standard used for creating Web service registries.

Microsoft will bundle version of its ESB Guidance package with the release. The Guidance package plugs into Visual Studio 2008, taking advantage of its built-in designers to help developers define higher-level flows of events and how they should be delivered using an ESB configuration, Kawasaki said. Visual Studio implements the appropriate BizTalk and .NET artifacts underneath, he added.

Aside from adding new integrations, BizTalk 2009 also taps into the Microsoft server stack. It now has the same failover clustering capabilities as Windows Server 2008 for greater reliability, as well as Hyper-V support. Customers can now spin up virtual instances of BizTalk; Enterprise Edition customers may have unlimited instances, Kawasaki said. Microsoft applies the same support policies to virtualized BizTalk as it does with conventional installations.

For users running third-party hypervisors on BizTalk, Microsoft will offer support, but Kawasaki cautioned that the level of support was unknown and would be dependent on many variables.

BizTalk 2009 broadens RFID support on the back end to Windows CE-powered devices with BizTalk RFID Mobile. BizTalk RFID Mobile debuted in April at RFID Journal LIVE 2008 in Las Vegas. The BizTalk RFID Standards Pack is also included in the release, which provides conformance to industry standards.
"Microsoft is delivering the promised functionality on schedule," said Ken Vollmer, principal analyst at Forrester Research. "This will be comforting for those enterprises that want the new features, [such as] more advanced support for RFID, stronger support for Microsoft's virtualization efforts, increased reliability due to failover clustering and more sophisticated application life-cycle management features."


Related Search Term(s): ALM, BizTalk, servers, virtualization, Microsoft


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