The BizTalk Purge & Archive Job now supports clean-up of orphaned instances

With the latest CU’s for BizTalk Server, the Purge and Archive job can now be configured to clean up orphaned instances. The biggest advantage is that the cleanup is done without any downtime…. yes this means you no longer need to run the BizTalk Health Monitor to clean them up!

The change was marked in the following Microsoft Support article: Orphaned BizTalk DTA service instances are not removed by the “DTA Purge and Archive” job in BizTalk Server

The change is included in the following cumulative update packages:

• BizTalk Server 2016 CU1
• BizTalk Server 2013 CU5
• BizTalk Server 2013 R2 CU6

Once you apply the CU to your servers, you will notice an additional parameter in the BizTalk DTA Purge and Archive SQL job: @fHardDeleteRunningInstances

If you would like to use the new behavior to clean-up the orphaned instances at run-time, you would need to set the parameter to 1, as displayed below:

exec dtasp_PurgeTrackingDatabase

1, –nLiveHours

30, –nLiveDays

7,  –nHardDeleteDays​

\\myserver\mybackupfolder, –nvcFolder

null, –nvcValidatingServer

0 , –fForceBackup

1 — fHardDeleteRunningInstances ​

Once set, the job will start removing any orphaned instances older than the @nHardDeleteDays parameter.

Keep in mind:

• CU’s should be thoroughly tested on DEV, TEST and ACCeptance environments, before migrating your production servers.
• It is still considered good practice to keep your scripts/setup in BizTalk Health Monitor. Regularly scan your system(s) to make sure everything is running smoothly.