Administration of MSMQ

If you are doing integration over Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ) all the provided links in this blogpost could be very useful. Administration of Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ) can be hard without the right information at your fingertips. Here you find everything necessary to setup and operate MSMQ successfully. Most of these links are very old and some of the administration information is a bit outdated on latest Windows Servers. Nonetheless are this blog post very helpful to understand the inner workings of MSMQ in order to properly configure it for production. I will add more links from time to time to this blogpost.

Last Update: 2.9.2014 22:12

• MSMQ and Powershell – How to get started with MSMQApplication
  This blog post shows you how to get started with MSMQ and Powershell by leveraging the power of MSMQApplication
• Forcing MSMQ to clean up its storage files
  “As I’ve probably discussed before, MSMQ does not perform garbage collection on its message storage files very often – every 6 hours or on service startup are the defaults.
  You can, though, run a script to ask the MSMQ service not to wait around.” – John Breakwell. This post explains how.
• So, what is an Outgoing Queue and what does MSMQ do with it it?
  “Outgoing queues are dynamically created by the MSMQ queue manager when your application is sending messages. This is MSMQ’s built-in store-and-forward mechanism in operation. The messages are stored in the local outgoing queue and then forwarded to the destination queue when the remote MSMQ machine is available. ” – John Breakwell
• How do I create an MSMQ outgoing queue?
  “Simple answer – you don’t.” – John Breakwell. Read more why in this blogpost
• How much load does MSMQ put on Active Directory?
  “I recently had a request from a customer who is planning on changing his MSMQ servers from workgroup mode to AD Integrated mode. They were looking for information and guidance on what kind of stress this would place on their AD Infrastructure. They have 20 queues, processing a total of 100,000 messages/day, with a 1MB average message size. I thought I would share my thoughts on this migration.” – John Breakwell
• How to help outgoing queues scale in MSMQ
  “This blog is written for those systems where a central MSMQ server sends messages to a large number of MSMQ clients. “Large” here could mean hundreds, maybe thousands.MSMQ is not designed to be a real-time system – although you can use it as such, that wasn’t the main focus. Instead MSMQ will ensure messages get delivered, no matter how long it takes. This means that you can send messages to thousands of destinations but not necessarily instantly or concurrently.To understand why this is, we need to look at the underlying mechanism.” – John Breakwell
• How to tell if MSMQ is actually in use on a server
  “Let’s say MSMQ is part of your company’s standard server build but you have been given the objective of removing the MSMQ service from those machines that do not require it. If you are handed responsibility for servers where there is no documentation and the previous support staff have moved on to other jobs then this job is going to be tricky. ” – John Breakwell
• Understanding how MSMQ security blocks RPC traffic
  This post explains how MSMQ security blocks RPC traffic
• Powershell Script to create an MSMQ
  “Here is a script to quickly create and delete queues. ” – John Breakwell
• What happens when you enabled Postive AND Negative Source Journaling in MSMQ?
  “For an overview of Source Journaling for those new to developing reliable messaging applications. Basically, source journaling keeps a copy of sent messages in a queue on the sending machine.” – John Breakwell
• How to send MSMQ messages over 4MB in size – Using file chunking in memory
  This post summarizes how to send messages over 4MB in size
• MSMQ and Terminal Server
  “First thing to cover is that each Terminal Server client does NOT get their own instance of MSMQ. The server will have one single MSMQ service (assuming it is not clustered) and that will manage all messaging activity generated by the clients.” – John Breakwell
• Using MSMQ quotas to improve startup time
  MSMQ can influence the startup time of your server.
• Changing the MSMQ Storage location
  “Some people have the situation where they have set up MSMQ using defaults and now find that the storage disk, usually the system drive C:, has insufficient space for the message volume they are seeing. If there are a number of these machines, or maybe they are in remote locations, a scripted solution for moving the storage location to a large data drive would be desirable.” – John Breakwell
• The particular software documentation
  The documentation of particular software contains many hints about MSMQ and how you should tweek it for production. Read and enjoy.
  
• Trying to make MSMQ licensing seem less complicated
  History of Licensing of MSMQ up to Windows Server 2008
• You can’t move a delivered MSMQ message
  “Delivered messages can’t be moved out of the queue they end up in – the only thing you can do is delete the message, either through receving it, purging the queue it is in, or waiting for any TimeToBeReceived timer to expire.” – John Breakwell
• Where have my MSMQ messages gone?
  It is important to note that MSMQ doesn’t lose your data. There’s no hole at the bottom of a queue where small messages can accidentally fall out, never to be seen again. Instead MSMQ will discard messages in certain circumstances unless told otherwise. Here are a range of scenarios which explain why messages seem to disappear without reason. You may think that I’m inventing purely theoretical situations for some of these but you’d be wrong – all of the following are based on real customer cases.
• Oil and water – MSMQ transactional messages and load balancing
  “A really common request is to load-balance MSMQ, either to “scale out” (adding more machines, as opposed to “scale up” by enhancing the existing server) or for high availability.For load-balancing to work, the traffic must be stateless as there is no guarantee that a sending machine will be using the same balancer each time.For express messages there isn’t a problem as these are stateless – “fire and forget”.Transactional messages, though, are not going to be happy with load balancing systems.” – John Breakwell
• MSMQ requires free contiguous space in storage before messages can be delivered
  “A customer was trying to send some large messages from one machine to another but, even though the destination had not yet reached its storage quota and there should have been enough capacity, nothing was getting delivered. The visible symptom was an outgoing queue with a status of “waiting to connect” whilst other outgoing queues to the same destination machine were working fine.”  – John Breakwell
• Cross-forest MSMQ? You need to be trusting
  How to do Cross-forest MSMQ

If you have additional links available please provide this in the comment section. By the way the helpful links of this blog post are also available in Microsoft’s new content sharing website Curah!