If a bad situation can get any worse it just did. Over the weekend my BizTalk server’s motherboard died. Of course nobody bothered to call the help desk so something timely could be done about. Nope. Came in on Monday and found out. Oh goody.
So it’s bad enough that the motherboard is dead. It turns out that backups were not being performed on the server. Admittedly we are in a UAT phase right now, but still. But it gets better.
I developed about 90% of the solution so that part went back in pretty quick. The other 10% was developed by a friend of mine, but he has already been rolled off the project. Because things have been so hectic lately I didn’t get a chance to closely review his work before he took off. So that last 10% took about 6 hours to get up and working. In fact I ended up taking his laptop home with me so he could come over to finish the work for me.
So now I’m sitting here retesting my system to make sure we are ready to resume our pilot. But it gets even better. My SOW runs out on the 30th (4 business days away) and they have not signed an extension yet. They have nobody on staff that knows BizTalk, CRM or SharePoint. My buddy Raja knows SharePoint but he hasn’t been extended either. I’ll keep my imaginings to myself as to what is about to happen to my client (but seriously – it couldn’t be clearer if you wrote it in large neon letters).
Anyway, usually I stay pretty focused on the development end of the business. But right now I think I need to do some research in to how you recover a dead BizTalk server. Specifically, how do I deploy my projects in such a fashion that when the server dies you are able to quickly get things back up and running.
I’m pretty sure Microsoft has some white papers, and I’ll read them. But I’m more interested in real world situations that really do occur. Shops that don’t have regimental HQ and huge bureaucracies that slow things down while covering every possible contingency. How does a shop like my client’s prepare itself for a disaster recovery scenario?