BizTalk Server 2010 Standard DOES support 64-bit

A while back I posted about BizTalk Server 2009 Standard not supporting 64-bit hosts. It was an odd thing in these times of 64-bit computing. The product group came very close to giving an outright promise to remove the limitation in the 2010 version.

For that reason I was very surprised to still find all references of the documentation suggesting that the limitation was still there. Like the sample below.

It might still be due to me misunderstanding exactly what “native 64-bit processing” really means. That’s part of the reason for this article..

When I asked (Paolo Salvatori) though I was told the documentation might be (and was probably) wrong. I took that on faith, but still, what better then a test now once the Standard edition has been release for download.

It started of bad with BizTalk Server Configuration. At this point the “32-bit only” checkboxes were grayed out and selected. Nor promising, but maybe it always looks that way.

However, when I got into the BizTalk Server Administration console I could create a 64-bit host.

And I could create and start a host instance for that host.

And yes, I am using a Standard Edition.

Update after Comment from Erik:

The process can, as per the picture above, be seen as running as the BTSNTSvc64.exe process.