BizTalk Enterprise on Azure

With Azure IaaS and BizTalk 2013 officially released I wanted to do a quick exercise of setting up a multi-server BizTalk environment.

I started by creating a virtual network and deployign a domain controller onto it, I then added a SQL Server instance from the platform images and joined it to the domain and finally I added a BizTalk Enterprise instance from the platform images and joined that to the domain too.

So far everything went smooth. I then nearly remembered that in a multi server environment I needed to manually create the necessary domain groups and that was easy enough to do but still – I could not get the BizTalk configuration Wizard to work.

Ok – at least partially this was due to my own arrogance thinking I can still remember how to do this by heart despite having not touched BizTalk in anger for over two years, but partially it is simply the Conifugraion Wizards unhelpful approach to error reporting.

Either way thrawling through the log file revealed the key to finding out what’s missing – the error – “Failed to read "KeepDbDebugKey" from the registry”

A quick Bing search pointed out the infamous mistake – missing the step to enable DTC appropriately.

Quite handily the BTS image comes with DTC correctly configured (no surprise there) but as I was using a vanilla SQL Server image it had DTC disabled, and that needed changing

With that done I could properly configure BizTalk 2013 on an Azure IaaS instance and get everything to work