Monday, November 21, 2011

Gotcha: Host instance set up during BizTalk Server reinstallation

Recently we had an intance where one of VM's had crashed which has BizTalk server installed on it with its databases on SQL Server hosted on a different machine. We then reinstalled and set up BizTalk Server and associated components. Since the other machine which has SQL Server was not down, we could see that all our application configuration (like applications, bindings, hosts, host instances etc.)  remained intact. Although all host instances were listed,  status of all host instances was shown as "Status Unavailable" which is because physical windows process for each host instance is not there on the machine which is just re-configured. Fortunately, it is easy to get the processes back on the machine by doing the following,
  1. Right click on host instance
  2. Click on Configure and just enter password (account name is already populated)
 We can now see that respective windows processes get created and status is changed to Stopped.

Another important step needed is to install BizTalk application assemblies into GAC.

HTH.