BizTalk 2006 and Virtualization

One of our customers is debating the virtualization options on BizTalk 2006 and would like to understand the virtualization support from BizTalk/Windows

1. Is Biztalk 2006 ( NOT R2) on window 2003 SP2 supported on VMware ESX?

2. Are the any specific Licencing caveats on using BizTalk on virtual environments

3. From few of the posts on the forum it seems BizTalk supports VMware virtualization, but any support case to be raised on such deployment may not be possible. Can someone from MS team throw somelight how would the support work in case of BTS hosted on VMware?

Hi,

Here is some feedback.

1. BizTalk is supported on VMWare. As long as the OS is genuine I think MS is open for the most part to what the OS is running on - physical or virtual.

2. Usually virtualization makes the license more cost effective for Enterprise edition because virtual processors are free with Enterprise edition. Also, since you pay per processor you could have lots of virtual BizTalk hosts on the same physical server.

3. I think the MS line would be that MS support would handle the BizTalk-related issues and VMWare would handle the VMWare issues.

__________________
Shaalini.S
Be the Best of Whatever you are...

Hi all,

Here's the virtualization link for BizTalk: Microsoft BizTalk Server supportability on a virtual machine

As you can see there BizTalk 2004 and above are fully supported on Microsoft Windows Serve 2005, Hyper-V, and any other products that have passed "Server Virtualization Validation Program", which includes but not restricted to:

VMware ESX 3.5 Update 2
VMware ESX 3.5 Update 3
VMware ESX 3.5 Update 4
VMware ESXi 3.5 Update 3
VMware vSphere 4 Version 4.0

Regards,

__________________
A.Rajesh Khanna