Support for high availability in the BizTalk Adapter for MSMQ when you use Message Queuing transactional messages in BizTalk Server 2004

This article describes support in the Microsoft BizTalk Adapter for MSMQ for high availability when you use Microsoft Message Queuing transactional messages in Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004.

When you use the BizTalk Adapter for MSMQ, BizTalk Server 2004 uses the full installation of Microsoft Message Queuing to receive Message Queuing messages. When you do not use the BizTalk Adapter for MSMQ, BizTalk Server 2004 only uses the BizTalk Message Queuing Adapter (MSMQT). However, you may have to use features that are included in Message Queuing 3.0, such as multithreaded processing. The BizTalk Adapter for MSMQ lets you take full advantage of Message Queuing.

The current design of Message Queuing and BizTalk Server 2004 prevents the use of transactional messages in a highly available BizTalk Server 2004 installation. The supported method to achieve high availability by using Message Queuing is to implement Message Queuing on a cluster. However, we recommend that you use a Network Load Balancer (NLB) that currently cannot be clustered in BizTalk Server 2004.

Message Queuing does not support sending a transactional message across an NLB. Therefore, when you use the BizTalk Adapter for MSMQ, you cannot use an NLB in BizTalk Server 2004 to implement both transactional messaging and a highly available environment.

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