How to do a good BizTalk Healthcheck part 1

As many of my friends know, my biggest interest is tuning and maintaining a BizTalk environment.

I made this list to make it easier for people to do a good health check. I would advise people to do the run at least once every 6th month. Calling Microsoft "in" to do the job is also recommended if you don't feel safe to do it yourself.. There are also many MVP's to help you out. You are also free to contact me. And i need to mention that i have been working with BizTalk 2006 R2 mostly so this guide is for BizTalk 2k6 and 2k6 R2, but can also be used for newer versions.

If you see something i dont have here, please feel free to leave me a comment.

Patching:
- What are the routines to install windows critical updates.
Good routines are critical.

-You should also run the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer (MBSA) on the servers Both SQL and Biztalk server. This is to identify and inconsistencies between the deployed updates and the current list of recommended updates

- Update COM+ and MSDTC.
Both COM+ and MSDTC are used by BizTalk, patches and hotfixes for these services often provide hotfixing to improve tuning and stability.

General Network
- DTCPing of all the servers
There should be no packets lost during this ping.

- Transfer 100mb data
if you have a 1gb network the response should be 5 seconds or faster (average between 3-5 seconds). Do to all the servers. If you are running a 100mb network up to 20 seconds is within the accaptable transfer rate (average is around 8 - 10 second)

- Pathping
Do a pathping from the BizTalk server to all the SQL servers ("pathping

- TCP/IP porth Echaustion
Troubleshoot to see if you are using less then 3000 ephemeral ports. TO do the counting write the following command on the BizTalk Servers "netstat -ano -p tcp" Count the number of unique Local Address TCP ports open above 1024 for each IP adresse. Using TCPView tool makes this is a lot easier.

- DBNETLIB Exceptions
Avoid this, DBnetLib (Database Network Library). The most common error when this occurs is when one of the BizTalk MessageBox becomes extremely busy. Attempts to communicate with the busy MessageBox database results in a timeout. Look for 5410 errors in the EventLog. (example of error message:
Event Type: Warning
Event Source: BizTalk Server 2006 R2
Event Category: BizTalk Server 2006 R2
Event ID: 5410
Computer:
Description:
An error occurred that requires the BizTalk service to terminate. The most common causes are the following: 1) An unexpected out of memory error. OR 2) An inability to connect or a loss of connectivity to one of the BizTalk databases. The service will shutdown and auto-restart in 1 minute. If the problematic database remains unavailable, this cycle will repeat.

-NetBIOS over TCP/IP
This is only a check for the BizTalk servers that have a direct connection to the internet such as those residing in a perimeter network hosting HTTP and SOAP adapters If the BizTalk servers reside in a vulnerable network location then check to ensure any internet/public facing network adapters have NetBIOS over TCP/IP disabled

Server general

-Time sync
Its vital that the time is synchronized between the BizTalk server, and SQL server. Check to see if the time is within the valid synchronization by typing the following command in command prompt "w32tm /stripchart /computer " to resynchronized the clocks type the following in the command prompt window "w32tm /resync /computer "

- BIOS Version
BIOS should be updated, this is because the releases from the manufactures can provide better satbilitet, and network related performance.

- Update the Certificate RevocationListUpdates
If it takes a long time to start up a BizTalk server it may be because you don't have access from the BizTalk server to reach the microsoft.com domain. You might get some startup issues because the .NET framework will try to download the Certificate Revocation LIST (CRL) from microsoft.com. You can update your servers manually by following these two links: http://crl.microsoft.com/pki/crl/products/CodeSignPCA.crl and
http://crl.microsoft.com/pki/crl/products/CodeSignPCA2.crl

I will come to more related to the BizTalk Server Configuration later. I dont want to spoilt it all by giving you everything at once.

Check part 2