How to keep deployed code on multiple BizTalk front ends in sync?

Question

We have multiple BizTalk 2006 application servers, and I find it almost impossible to keep the versions of our projects in sync on them. It's a tedious process of deploying the MSI packages, importing them, matching up files in the GAC, deploying some registry changes, and if one step is missed or somebody deployed an updated copy of a DLL directly to one server and not another, there's no easy way to tell.

How do others ensure that copies of software between the two servers are the same version?

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Some Background:

Our environment has two (non-clustered) BizTalk front end servers and a separate database back-end. Until recently, though we had both front-ends configured, the host instances were stopped on the second server because of some troubleshooting. They've been disabled for a few months, and we're deployed some updated code in the meantime.

This morning, I did a folder diff on the GAC, as well as the folder that holds the local disk copy of the DLLs for our deployed project (C:\OurProject\ on both servers), and everything matched - same file sizes, same timestamps. However, once I turned on the second set of services, it became obvious that Server2 was using an old version of the project DLL - of the next three files processed, two had normal results and one was clearly out of date.

Please help me avoid an aneurysm.

Answer 1

One thing you may want to look into is the BizTalk Deployment Framework.

We are currently building up a new environment with BizTalk 2009 and I started out with a set of MSBuild scripts that handle exporting sources from SubVersion, building and deploying assemblies using BTSTask.

Of course BTSTask lacks a lot of functionality (start/stop applications) but at least for BizTalk 2006 there is BTSControl.

Answer 2

We use an automated build script whose ultimate end is an MSI with binding files for Dev/Stage/Prod. All released binding files are stored on a share and used to load the BizTalk server by hand. First the App is stopped, MSI's executed on both servers and then MSI imported. During the import, we specify the environment for the bindings and voila. We've had no issues with loss of synch.

So, I'd suggest taking all of your latest MSIs and re-execute them on the servers where you have differences. Otherwise, just try to put a process in place to create a repeatable load process by hand.