Unfortunately, I wasted a few hours today. My current customer is still on BT2006/R2, but might be moving to BT2009 or BT2010 soon. I was building-out a Virtual PC with Win 2008, and just assumed that I could run BT2009 with SQL2008/R2. Well you cannot! I guess BT2010 will be the first version of BizTalk to work with SQL2008/R2.

You normally think that something small like an R2 won’t make that much a different, but indeed it does.

Here’s where I got confirmation of this:
Stack Overflow 2966186

You have to open the install log to see the error – and it’s various ambigous:

[13:05:10 Error BtsCfg] Failed to create Management database “BizTalkMgmtDb” on server “WhatEver”.
Error “0x80040E1D” occurred. Other blogs talk about this error being caused by not having Case-Insenstive turned on for you SQL Server. I guess basically, it means BizTalk doesn’t like something about your SQL server, but sadly, it doesn’t really tell you what it that it doesn’t like.

When will Microsoft start making user-friendly errors? LOL.
And when will the numbering schemes for the products make sense? More Laughter!