BizTalk 2006 on VMWare Workstation

A client I was working for wanted BizTalk 2006 running on VMWare Workstation 5. Easy I thought, so I installed Windows Server 2003 Std R2, SQL Server 2005 Ent + sp1 applied all hotfixes and service packs via Windows Update, followed the BizTalk install guide religiously but still couldn't get the BizTalk configuration to apply successfully.

The Basic configuration was failing with an SSO issue:

Failed to generate and backup the master secret to file: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Enterprise Single Sign-On\SSO0FAB.bak (SSO) Additional Information (0x80070005) Access is Denied.

After much head scratching and searching it appears to be a similar issue to that reported with Microsoft Virtual PC.


The work around to get the Basic Configuration applying correctly is pretty simple.

1. Un-configure the BizTalk installation using the option on the Wizard.
2. Delete the Databases that the un-configure didn't remove (SSODB + BusinessRulesdB) otherwise the config will fail again next time you try.
3. Create the SSO Administrators security group manually.
4. Add the installing user's account and the BizTalk Service account to this new group.
5. Reboot the VM
6. Re-run BizTalk Configuration and this time it should all work swimmingly.

Welcome to the Venture Technologies Company Blog

So what do we do? Well, to put it simply (and to save re-quoting our web site http://www.venturetechnologies.co.uk/) I like to think of us in the same vein as Venture Capitalists except that our "Capital" is Development Resource. We invest our technical skills in companies and entrepreneurs to help them get their new products and ideas to market.

The Venture Technologies Blog is going to be a place to let the world know some of the juicy 'ins and outs' of our investments as well as 'techie tit-bits' that we find in our day to day dealings with the Microsoft development platform.


Talking about the Microsoft development platform, our consulting business has really taken off in the last six months and we're spending an increasing amount of time working with companies who are implementing either Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. With both products having their own unique intricacies, I'm sure we'll build up a useful library of Do's and Don'ts that we will happily share with you.