Recently I’ve had the need to setup a BizTalk Server 2006 R2 virtual machine. Quietly confident about my experience with this version of BizTalk, I jumped in head first to quickly get a simple single server based installation configured on a 32-bit VMWare based VM.

Lesson learned today; never, ever underestimate the obscure errors that BizTalk Server can produce. The install was smooth sailing. But when the time came to configure SSO, this happended:

Failed to generate and backup the master secret to file: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Enterprise Single Sign-On\SSO07AB.bak (SSO) Additional Information (0x80070005) Access is Denied.

I wracked my brain for a previous solution to this, but never have I seen this. There is speculation this may be a very rare bug that arises only in the context of doing single server VM based configurations. Regardless of the cause, it is not helpful.

Thank you to Mikael Sand, for detailing the solution to this. Un-configure and manually blast away any features and/or databases the configuration tool may have created. Create the two groups SSO Administrators and SSO Affiliate Administrators (alternatively name them whatever you like) manually. Add the account you are running the configuration tool under, and the BizTalk service account to these newly created groups. Log off. Re-run the configuration tool.

What a curve ball!