Latest Biztalk Admin Interview Questions Part – 2
What Jobs Do You Need To Configure When You Install Biztalk?
The Backup BizTalk job (location of Full and Log backups).
The DTA Purge and Archive job (at least the location where you want to Archive Tracking data.
After you have configured the jobs, don’t forget to enable them
What Are Thresholds?
From a BizTalk perspective, these are numeric values, which can be configured on your Hosts and host instances, and lead to Throttling situations once they are crossed.
Why Do You Have Automatic Throttling States And What Can It Be Used For?
To warn the BizTalk Administrator that BizTalk is under stress or something abnormal is happening to the environment, these may only affect certain hosts or all hosts in the environment depending on the throttling state
What Does A “high Available Environment” Mean?
BizTalk can be configured in that it uses a Failover- or Load Balanced cluster.
By doing so, BizTalk uses several physical or virtual machines to spread the workload.
In case one of the machines goes down, BizTalk is still able to process workload on the other machine(s).
What Is Nlb?
This stands for Network Load Balancing.
It’s one of the possibilities to make IIS high available on machines where BizTalk is installed.
BizTalk itself however has its own load balacing.
What Is Host Architecture?
A Host Architecture describes how BizTalk uses Hosts and Host Instances for spreading its workload. Normally you have Hosts for Receiving messages, Processing orchestrations, Sending messages and Tracking completed messages.
How Do You Route Messages By Receive Port Name?
By adding a filter on a Send Port, which points to that Receive Port.
How Do You Measure Performance For Biztalk?
By using PerfMon and configure counters for CPU, Memory, I/O, Throttling. Besides using Perfmon, you can use tools like PAL, SQLIO, SQLProfiler, and IOMeter.
Which Are The Four Most Important Biztalk Databases?
BizTalkMgmtDb (contains the configuration of a BizTalk Group)
BizTalkMsgBox (contains the messages and work in progress)
BizTalkDTADb (contains information about the completed processes)
SSODb (contains credential information)
What Are The Dangers Of Filters Combined With Send Port Groups And Multiple Send Ports?
There is the risk that Send Ports which are also used in Send Port Groups, pick up the message multiple times, leading to the danger that the message is processed multiple times, where it should be processed only once.
What Needs To Be Backed Up For A Complete Disaster Recovery?
Besides the databases, the Master Secret Key and all application and programs on the BizTalk Machine.
What Is An Orphan Message?
An orphaned messages is a message that has completed and finished its processing in the BizTalk message box however the information of this is not updated in the tracking database and will hold space in the tracking database until manually deleted or updated.
What Is A Zombie Message?
A zombie messages is a messages that arrives after an orchestration has finished, and can no longer reference back to the orchestration of it origin.
Where Can You Locate Configuration Of Your Environment?
You can locate configuration information both on the BizTalk machines and the BizTalkMgmtDb.
How Many Host Can We Have?
There is no rule about how many hosts you may have. However there are certain guidelines and its recommended to have hosts for the following
Receive Host :
Used for all in process receiving
Processing Host :
Used for all Orchestration
Isolated Host :
Used for all IIS receiving
Send Host :
Used for sending of messages
Tracking Host :
Used for moving data from MessageBox to Tracking database
There may be more then one for each of these jobs depending on the workload and resource usage including host settings etc.
Why Biztalk Messageboxdb Maxdop Value Should Be 1?
DOP stands for Degree of Parallelism. BizTalk Server database queries are relatively small, and they execute quickly.
Therefore, BizTalk Server database queries do not benefit from a Parallelism setting that specifies using more than one processor.
Changing the Parallelism setting to specify using more than one processor may have an adverse effect on BizTalk Server database queries
What Is The Maximum Size Of Message, Biztalk Can Process?
While BizTalk Server imposes no restriction on message size, practical limits and dependencies might require you to minimize the size of your messages because large messages require more processing resources.