Every application needs management. Ideally an application should provide two ways of management. First an administrator needs a (graphical) console to be able to do single or ad-hoc actions like changing configuration, responding to error conditions, etc. Second there should be a way for an administrator to create and run scripts. Scripts allow administrators to store a set of repetitive tasks in a container (called a script) in order to be able to easily do the same action over and over again. This is also called automation.
The best way to for any application to support management and automation is to implement such functionality on top of Windows PowerShell. Windows PowerShell contains a comprehensive API which enables the implementation of Cmdlets or a Cmdlet provider and the implementation of custom hosts.
Cmdlets or a cmdlet provider
PowerShell has uniform syntax for working with commands working and container hierarchies. This is a great advantage for administrators as they only need to learn a single way of working to manage it all. By implementing cmdlets we can “translate” this PowerShell way of working in calls to an applications native management API.
This is exactly what we have done in the provider for BizTalk. Internally we call BizTalk management APIs like ExplorerOM to perform things like starting applications, exporting MSIs, etc.
A custom host
Besides implementing custom cmdlets you can also implement a custom PowerShell host. The host can be any sort of application as long as it implements the PowerShell host interfaces. It can be a Win32 app, a web app or a text console for example.
This is exactly what Microsoft has done in the most recent versions of Exchange server (2007 & 2010). Management is done using PowerShell. The graphical management console is a PowerShell host. Exchange can be managed using this GUI or for example using scripts or commands running in the command shell console that comes out of the box with PowerShell.
The diagram below shows this architecture:
Things get even more interesting since we have PowerShell 2.0. It has a new feature called remoting which allows for remote administration and automation. Remoting uses WinRm (Microsofts implementation of the WS-Management standard). Goods news is that WinRM is firewall friendly. It only uses http(s) for communication. Now the diagram looks like this:
Is this secure? Yes it is, both PowerShell and WinRM have been designed with focus on security. Both come out of the box with security enabled. Of course you still need to pay attention especially when exposing things outside the enterprise.
Back to BizTalk
For BizTalk we have a couple of options to remotely administer a BizTalk server. We can choose between: Remote Desktop, client installation of Admin console, custom web services for management tasks, etc. Of course all have their pros and cons. With PowerShell remoting we have a new additional option.
Below I’ll show a couple of screens to see how this works.
I used two virtual machines in this demo. I installed the following software on those machines:
Virtual machine 1 (name: BTS2K9-dev):
- Windows Server 2008 R2 (I know not supported for hosting BizTalk)
- SQL Server 2008
- BizTalk Server 2009
- PowerShell 2.0
- PowerShell provider for BizTalk 1.0 (beta)
Virtual machine 2 (name: Client):
- Windows Server 2008 R2
- PowerShell 2.0
- PowerShell provider for BizTalk 1.0 (beta)
The obvious but important thing to note here is that the only thing that I have installed on virtual machine 2 that is related to BizTalk is the provider. In other words I did NOT NEED ANYTHING from the BizTalk installation CD on this machine.
The first thing I needed to was to enable remoting in PowerShell. This very simple and only requires the execution of a single command ‘Enable-PSRemoting’.
Second thing I needed to do was to add the client to the list of trusted computers on the BizTalk box. This mainly needs to be done because I just wanted to communicate over http instead of https for this demo.
On the BizTalk Box the management console is shown. Note that the default host instance is stopped:
Back to the PowerShell console on the Client to do the following:
- Create a new remote session on the BizTalk Box.
- Add the PowerShell provider snap in to the session.
- Switch to the default BizTalk drive.
- Switch the location to the host instances.
- Start the default host instance.
Finally a check on the other box to see if the host instance is running to verify this has worked (need to refresh the admin console first):
As you can see in the screen shots this is really easy to do. In my opinion it is a great new, location transparent, firewall friendly, client only way of managing BizTalk Server.
The only thing left to be done is to rebuild the BizTalk Administration Console on top of Windows PowerShell. 
Tagged: BizTalk, BizTalk Management, BizTalk tools, PowerShell
