Best Practices of BizTalk Disaster Recovery

Create a backup and restore plan

• Be sure your backup plan specifies:

· The computer where backups will be stored

· The programs that you will use to back up your system

· The computers you want to back up

· The schedule when backups will occur

· The offsite location where you will archive backups

Keep a written record of all changes to your SQL Server system

• Be sure to write down all changes to your system, such as service packs, hotfixes, and QFEs that have been applied. This is crucial to getting your system restored as closely as possible to what existed before the hardware failure.

Implement the following measures to help prevent or minimize the effect of a disaster

• Have your software and firmware updates available.
• Have all software disks readily available.
• Have a plan to monitor servers proactively. This is very important since orchestration instances on a failed host may not be recovered by a second host for up to 10 minutes.
• Maintain hardware records.
• Maintain software records.

Implement fault tolerance in your organization at the hardware or software level

• Implementing clusters and redundant array of independent disks (RAID) helps ensure that your system can survive a hardware failure.

Archive the backup media on a regular basis in a secure location

• Create a schedule for archiving your backup media on a regular basis and keep the archives in a secure, offsite location. This ensures that you have a backup available when you need it.

Verify the integrity of your backups and that they occur without error

• Monitor all of your backup jobs and ensure that they complete without any errors.

Keep identical spare hardware available

• Having identical spare hardware available ensures that you can quickly replace defective hardware to get up and running more quickly.

Document and test your recovery procedures

• Disaster recovery testing should be conducted before ever running your system in production. Having plans in place and performing prerelease testing will ensure that your IT staff can recover your BizTalk Server systems.

Train your IT staff on disaster recovery procedures

• Ensure that your IT staff is prepared to recover the system should the need arise.

Practice restoring from a backup in a test environment

• Practice restoring your BizTalk Server system in a test environment to ensure that you can restore it to your production environment if a failure occurs.

Planning disaster recovery

To ensure that all your systems and data can be quickly restored to normal operation if a failure occurs, you must create a disaster recovery plan. When you create this plan, consider scenarios for different types of disasters that might affect your system, including natural disasters, such as a fire, and technical disasters, such as a two-disk failure in a RAID-5 array. When you create a disaster recovery plan, identify and prepare for all the necessary steps to respond to each type of disaster. Testing the recovery steps for each scenario is essential. Microsoft recommends that you verify your disaster recovery plan through the simulation of a catastrophic event.

Consider disaster recovery planning in the context of your particular environmental and business needs. For example, suppose a fire occurs and wipes out your 24-hour data center. Are you certain you can recover? How long will it take you to recover and have your system available? How much data loss can your users tolerate?

Ideally, your disaster recovery plan includes how long recovery will take and the final condition of the system. For example, you might determine that after the acquisition of specified hardware, recovery will be completed in 48 hours, and data will be guaranteed only until the end of the previous week.

A disaster recovery plan can be structured in many different ways and can contain many types of information. Disaster recovery plan types include the following:

• A plan to acquire hardware.
• A communication plan.
• A list of people to be contacted in the event of a disaster.
• Information on the ownership of the administration of the plan.
• A checklist of required tasks for each recovery scenario. To help you review how disaster recovery progressed, initial each task as it is completed, and indicate the time of completion on the checklist.

Ensuring disaster readiness

To ensure that you can recover your system after a disaster, Microsoft recommends that you periodically perform the following activities:

• Test your backup and recovery procedures thoroughly before a real failure occurs. Testing helps to ensure that you have the required backups to recover from various failures, that your procedures are clearly defined and documented, and that they can be executed smoothly and quickly by any qualified operator.
• Perform regular database, transaction log, and file system backups to minimize the amount of lost data. Microsoft recommends that you back up both system and user databases.
• Maintain system logs in a secure fashion. Keep records of all service packs installed on Microsoft Windows, your database, and Microsoft Dynamics AX.
• On another server or set of servers, assess the steps you need to take to recover from a disaster. If necessary, amend the steps as necessary to suit the local server environment, and then test the amended steps.

Make sure that you understand and document the database and file access rights required to recover the database and application folder and get it to a working production state.