BizTalk 2009 and SQL Server Database Aliases

We are in the middle of installing BizTalk 2009 at my current company. Our database guru decided that all future databases would use database CNames, making the databases a little more flexible if future changes are needed. Flexibility is always a good thing.

A bit of background:

1. We have a clustered SQL Server 2008 environment (Active/Passive failover) that BizTalk is using.


2. We are installing most of the BizTalk install options.


3. We are installing UDDI 3.0 and ESB 2.0 as well (LOTS of blog material on these two to come).

Unfortunately, we ran into problems with the BizTalk Server Configuration tool, as it's not consistent with itself. The Enterprise SSO and BizTalk Rules Engine configurations accept the CName just fine. However, the Group and BAM Tools don't recognize the CName at all... Maybe there were different developers between these sections?

Our database admin came up with another idea: use an alias in the SQL Server Configuration Manager, as shown below. We acknowledge that it wasn't the best solution, but it does allow us to have a single place where we can change the database name if needed.

That worked just fine for the BizTalk Configuration itself.

However, we ran into problems with this with the UDDI and ESB installs. Neither CNames nor Aliases worked - we had to put in the actual SQL Server name!

If anything, it's VERY inconsistent at best. Hopefully Microsoft will recognize this and make changes so that all setups/installers are consistent with each other.

There's also some more entries from Andy Morrison, who is helping me with the install.

BizTalk ESB Exception Notification, ESB UDDI Publishing services won't start on boot

I've recently installed BizTalk 2009 on a new virtual machine (Windows Server 2003) I created. I also installed the ESB 2.0 Toolkit and the UDDI 3.0 services as well.

After each time I would boot up the machine, I would get the almighty "At least on service has failed" message. After looking into the event viewer, I noticed two outstanding errors:
'Microsoft.Practices.ESB.AlertService.AlertException' occurred and was caught.
and
Cannot open database "ESBAdmin" requested by the login. The login failed.

However, if I manually started the BizTalk ESB Exception Notification and BizTalk ESB UDDI Publishing services after all services completely started, they would start up just fine.

Both appeared to be database errors. To a degree they are, but I think it's because the MSSQLSERVER service hasn't completely finished "starting up".

It also seemed to me that the ESB services were starting before the BizTalk Server services, which didn't make much sense to me.

My solution was to create two entries in the registry:
1)Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\BizTalk ESB Exception Notification
2) Create a new multi-string value called DependOnService (case-sensitive)
3) Add entry to this value: BTSSvc$BizTalkServerApplication

Do the same thing with HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\BizTalk ESB UDDI Publishing. I also added MSSQLSERVER and SQLSERVERAGENT values to the two, just to be safe.

Now my services are starting like they should when a restart/bootup occurs on the BizTalk server.