Restoring BizTalk ports and orchestrations after maintenance shutdown

Given a scenario where you have a maintenance window, and need to shut down one or more applications, you might find it challenging when you are going to start them up again.

If you are working with a large BizTalk solution, the Application Stop and Start functionality might not be useful. -If you had ports that where disabled, stopped or unenlisted before shutting the application down, these will also be started when starting up the application again. If these ports and orchestrations where disabled for a reason, this approach will not be acceptable.

If you have separated your BizTalk hosts into Receive-, Send- and Processing ones, you could solve the problem by stopping the host instances in the right order, rather than the Applications. But if you only want to stop and start some of the applications, you'd be required to have three host instances per application, which is highly unlikely.

I've seen customers work with WMI scripts to solve this problem, and even though this works, it takes for ever to execute these scripts.

-So, if you are looking for a tool where you'd be able to stop an Application or the entire BizTalk group, and bring it back up again (as it looked before you shut it down), this tool might be what you're looking for.

The console application has functionality to take a "snapshot" from what your BizTalk group looks like. The snapshot is stored in an xml file, which you can modify manually if you like. You can start or stop the entire BizTalk group or just one application at the time. When execution the [start] command, you'll be prompt to select the snapshot file to use.

Usage:

snapshot

The user will be prompt to type the name of the snapshot file, to which the state of all ports and orchestrations will be saved.

stop -[Application] or [* = all applications]

This command will stop every port and orchestration from specified application. The user can optionally make a snapshot before executing the command. Before committing the changes, the user is presented a view of what is going to happen.

start -[Application] or [* = all applications]

The user will be prompt to specify which snapshot file to use. Only the ports and orchestrations that where started/enabled before the snapshot was taken will be started. Before committing the changes, the user is presented a view of what is going to happen.

Binaries: BizTalkManagerConsole.zip