Planning the Development, Testing, Staging, and Production Environments

This topic discusses the environments used in the release management process for a BizTalk solution. As with any enterprise software solution, you should follow established software release management guidelines when you develop and release a BizTalk solution. This process should include the following distinct stages:

• Development

• Testing

• Staging

• Production

  Ideally, you should complete each stage in the release management process in a discrete environment, separate from the other environments. Realistically, you may have to combine one or more of the environments due to hardware, time, or other resource constraints. At a bare minimum you should separate the production environment from the other environments.

For example, for a BizTalk Server environment that uses five virtual machines (two computers running BizTalk Server, two Microsoft SQL Server cluster nodes, and one domain controller), you would plan to have 3 GB of memory installed on the host computer. If the BizTalk Server environment requires more than 2 GB of memory, consider installing a 64-bit version of Windows on the host computer to ensure that the maximum amount of installed memory is accessible by the host operating system.

Development Environment

The BizTalk projects that are used for the BizTalk solution are created in the development environment. You should install the following software on the computers used in the BizTalk Server development environment:

• Internet Information Services (IIS)

• Visual Studio

• SQL Server Client Tools

• BizTalk Server (including the following components)

  • Documentation

  • Administrative tools

  • Developer tools and SDK

  • Additional software

• SQL Server, if the BizTalk Server databases are to be hosted locally during development.

• Typically developers should have their own development computer (physical or virtual) with the necessary software installed.

Testing Environment

Unit testing can be completed in a virtual environment. You should, however, conduct your performance testing in a physical environment with hardware and software that is identical to the production environment.

The testing environment is used to measure performance characteristics such as maximum sustainable throughput (MST) and maximum sustainable tracking throughput of the BizTalk solution. It should therefore match the physical production environment as closely as possible. For more information about measuring performance characteristics of a BizTalk solution see Engine Performance Characteristics, or the BizTalk Server Performance Optimization Guide.

Staging Environment

You typically use the staging environment to "unit test" the actual deployment of the BizTalk solution. The software installed in the staging environment should closely match the software installed in the production environment. It may, however, be acceptable to use virtual computers in the staging environment since this environment is not to be used for measuring performance. For more information about deploying a BizTalk application to a staging environment see Staging Tasks for BizTalk Application Deployment.

Production Environment

The production environment is the "live" environment that will host the running BizTalk solution. The production environment is the final endpoint in the release management process and should only host BizTalk applications that have previously undergone development, unit testing, load testing, and staging in the other environments. Thorough unit testing, load testing, and staging beforehand will help ensure maximum performance and uptime for the BizTalk application in the production environment.

Guidelines for Allocating Servers

The following guidelines provide a rule of thumb for the number of BizTalk servers and SQL servers you should allocate to each stage in the release management process given a particular number of physical computers expected to be used in production: They are rough estimates which are subject to change depending on your architecture.

See Also

Planning the Environment for BizTalk Server