Tip: Replicating BizTalk Server 2010 dashboard settings across Host(Instance)s

One of the core enhancements introduced with BizTalk 2010 edition is improved BizTalk Settings Dashboard. This feature provides us an unified location to set various performance tuning settings at Group or Host or Host Instance level. In order to open this settings window, right click on BizTalk Group and choose Settings. We can also find Import and Export options on this window which allows us to migrate settings between various environments (like QA, UAT, PROD etc.) using Import and Export buttons. Here is an interesting use case of this Import/Export feature.

It is very common that we create multiple Hosts(InProcess and/or Isolated) and/or multiple Host instances under each Host as needed. It would also be common that we might want to set similar settings (with minor changes) on these hosts and/host instances. Since there are lot of settings available to fine tune the performance, it would be lot of manual effort to manually configure these settings across multiple host/host instances. So we can simplify this by configuring settings on one Host and/or one Host Instance and export to an xml file. And then Import this file on same server and map the Host/HostInstance(on Source side) that we configured to all other Hosts/Host Instances(on Destination side). After finishing the wizard, we can see that settings get replicated as intended and we can then go ahead make if there is any slight modifications needed for specific Host/Host instance. Here is sample screen shot of mapping part of the wizard,

HTH.