Managing suspended/dehydrated instances when redeploying orchestrations

Question

Scenario:

A biztalk application is deployed with a receive port, orchestration and send port. Messages flow correctly.

At some point, a bug is found in the orchestration, causing messages to suspend. The orchestration must be fixed and redeployed.

Question:

Because you can't redploy an orchestration with suspended instances, how would you go about retaining those messages, terminating the instances, redeploying and then resending those messages through the fixed orchestration? Is there a process or tool for this?

Answer 1

If the bug doesn`t require major modification - i.e no new orchestrations, no new schemas, no new promoted fields etc, then a short term 'hack' is possible, viz by simply reinstalling the fixed MSIs (and GAC) on your servers, and restarting the host instances (using NLB if applicable) (i.e. without importing the MSI's into BizTalk).

You should then be able to resume any suspended (resumable) orchs. Then schedule some downtime at a less busy time, put your app into partially stopped to prevent new orchs starting, wait for all running orchs to complete, and then import the fixed MSI (consider bumping up the buggy orch assembly version with the hotfix)

Building a custom tool with the ability to audit all messages going in and out of Biztalk is useful, so you can replay them. This will allow you to terminate orchs, reinstall, and then replay.

Answer 2

You can as well fix the orchstration and while building it, increment the version of the assembly. This way you can have parallel deployment of the orchestrations. You can unenlist the existing one after deploying the newer versioned orchstration.