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.

Some random BizTalk Server facts!!!

Here is an attempt to compile some vital information related to BizTalk server that might be useful to be aware of. I will keep updating this post as I find more interesting facts to share with. Also please feel free to let me know, if there are any corrections to the facts listed below or other useful facts.

• Default number of Retry's that an atomic shape in an orchestration has (not sure yet, if this can be reset to different value) : 20
• Number of levels that scopes can be nested within an orchestration: 44
• Default Isolation Level for Atomic Transaction Type: ReadCommitted
• Two of the ACID properties that may not be guaranteed by Long Running Transaction are: Atomicity and Isolation
• Only called orchestrations may have Compensation. Any compensation on top-level orchestration will be ignored by Runtime engine.
• out and reference parameters can not be passed with Start Orchestration shape (may be due to asynchronous nature of Start shape)

HTH