As you might know the standard edition of BizTalk Server has a limit for the number of applications you can deploy. The BizTalk licensing FAQ states:
“BizTalk Server 2009 STD may be the best option; however, BizTalk Server 2009 STD is limited to five BizTalk applications”
For me reading the FAQ did not make things more clear. In fact I had two additional questions about the five application limit after reading. Besides that I also see questions around this topic pop up in the community regularly. So there are more people confused about this.
My questions are:
1). Is the five application limit a hard limit or is it "just" a licensing thing?
For example what if you have a hot deployment strategy where you want to deploy a new version of the fifth application. Obviously you un-deploy the old version as soon as possible but for a short period of time you need one application above the limit. Is this technically possible or is standard edition restricting this?
2). How about the “system” and default application? Are those included in the limit?
You get “BizTalk.System” and “BizTalk application 1” out of the box after configuring BizTalk. Do they count? In other words can I only install 3 additional applications? I personally almost set my own custom application as the default application and remove “BizTalk application 1”. Of course I don’t touch “BizTalk.System’ as it is the part of the BizTalk infrastructure. But what does that mean for the maximum number of applications?
The only way (for me) to find answers is to try out. Of course I never took the time to install standard edition which is why this was on my “to find out” list for far too long. Last week I stumbled across a standard edition (our system administrator accidentally installed Standard edition instead of developer edition on our development machines). I took this chance to get my answers.
The machine was clean and I started creating Application 1, Application 2, etc. While trying to create application 6 I got:
So, first answer: This is a hard limit. Second answer: No, “BizTalk.System” and “BizTalk application 1” are not included.
What if I delete “BizTalk application 1” (set another application to default first)? Can I create an additional application? The answer is: yes.
So as a reminder for myself and other people looking for this information:
BizTalk Standard has a hard limit of five applications. The out-of-the box (OOTB) applications “BizTalk.System” and “BizTalk Application 1” are not included meaning you can have five additional applications next to the OOTB applications.
Tagged: BizTalk, Licensing
