Whilst trying to setup a small multi-box BizTalk environemnt within Virtual Server 2005 this week i've encountered a really annoying error whilst applying my BizTalk configuration settings. The configuration wizard would fail with the following error
"Failed to Deploy BizTalk system assembly "C:\Program Files\Microsoft BizTalk
Server 2004\Microsoft BizTalk.GlobalPropertySchema.dll".
A Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator Problem prevented Connection
to the Configuration Database. The transaction has already been implicitly or
explicitly committed or aborted.
[MicrosoftBizTalk.Deployment.DeploymentException] Cannot opent database
BizTalkMgmtDb on server BTSDB
It turns out this is because i had copied the same virtual hard disk for use as the base for each of the virtual machines in my environment. Essentially MsDtc on each of the virtual machines has the same identifiers and therefore cannot communicate with each other. Does anyone know of the internals at all?
To overcome this i re-installed MsDtc on each of the virtual machines before i installed anything. This is done by running the following within a command prompt (after which i rebooted):
msdtc -uninstall
msdtc -install