Performance tuning development VM

It is a general complain of any developer. Why is it so SLOOOWWWWW? And yes, it is slow. But there are performance tuning tricks.  Slow is influence on 3 things

• Startup VM
  • Is also startup of
    • Batches
    • Management reporter
    • Windows security
    • Windows update
    • Windows maintenance
  • SQL
    • There is no SQL maintenance
  • Disk
    • Storage type

You could disable the batches & management reporter. That will help. But the real issue is how the disks of that VM are configured.  In general, it looks like below 16 lazy disks.

Now you can change these to faster disks , but please be aware of the prices. Also, these are managed disk, the cost fixed amount every month, so stopping the VM will not reduce below cost.

How does the disk migration work?  The first step is migration to managed disks

Managed Disks simplify disk management for VMs by managing the Storage accounts behind the scenes. Managed Disks also provide granular access control with RBAC and better reliability for VMs in an Availability Set. Learn more about the benefits of using Managed Disks

Source unmanaged disks are not deleted after the migration. Managed Disks are created by making a copy of the source disks. You can revert back to unmanaged disks by creating a new VM with the source disks. Configuration of the VMs is not changed after the migration. Learn more about migrating to Managed Disks

In order to complete migration, we will need to start the virtual machine. Once migration is complete, you may stop the virtual machine.

Next you can change all the discs

But hold on 16 disks multiplied with 18.29 makes 292 euro on top of running the VM. This is very expensive in the relation to how you use it. So next step:

• Archive your code & database.
• Delete the VM
• Deploy a new one

And of course, do not forget to setup the auto shutdown and the azure software reductions

Dynamics 365 LCS Tricks – install Knowledge Base (KB) article

LCS is the place for getting all the information from Microsoft related to your Dynamics 365 for Operations projects. This Web portal also allows you to get your MS fixes to your environment and knows which Knowledge Base (KB) articles have been applied.
In the next image, for instance, we can see that there are 167 fixes applicable. So, let’s start cherry picking.

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Dynamics 365 LCS tricks – platform update 4 experience

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Dynamics 365 LCS Tricks – mass install packages

Deploying packages is a time-consuming thing. MS has improved the speed, but we partner can also help. This helping is by merging the packages. Good merged combinations are Binary updates and x++ updates, but your own code can also be combined with your customizations on your Retail (SDK) part.

Till now I was not able to merge ISV packages, so those must be deployed separately.  However, there is quick dirty trick for local VM.

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Dynamics 365 LCS tricks – force LCS to update

LCS is your friend in Dynamics 365 as long it is up-to-date. And I have seen it is not always the case. So I will share some tricks to force it.

There are some things you should know LCS is only updating 1 time a day and that is 10 o clock in the evening.  But when you look in LCS you see it is not updated for a couple of days. So what’s next?

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Dynamics 365 LCS tricks – A day in the life of LCS

We all must use LCS when working with Dynamics 365 these days, sometimes it feels good and sometimes it is frustrating.

The next real live image of LCS shows how I feel about the experience.

We are speeding up but at the same time we have to wait. 

The pitfalls one might encounter are the following:

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How to start with an empty AX database in your local VM

When you want to work with the new Microsoft Dynamics AX, you have some options to deploy the environment. You can choose between deploying an environment on Azure or  download a local machine. The purpose of the local machine is mainly a development box, but can also be used for demonstrations (with some limitations). The local environment always contains a predefined demonstration database. What if you want to start with an empty AX database or test with configurations that will be used by the customer? Continue reading and you will know how to start with another database.

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Microsoft Dynamics AX – Release to Web (RTW)

Congrats to the Microsoft Dynamics AX team. They had completed the Release to Web (RTW) version of Microsoft Dynamics AX last Monday. This version has build number 7.0.1265.3015 and has been made available for deployments now. A downloadable virtual machine (VM) will follow soon.

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Microsoft Dynamics AX – Trial mode

In December 2015, Microsoft released the preview of the new Microsoft Dynamics AX. Partners and customers can now learn what the new cloud based version could bring you. You can deploy a cloud hosted environment from Lifecycle services. When this is complete you can start browsing and learning how to use the cloud based version of Microsoft Dynamics AX. Probably you have already heard about the task guides. There is a way to start your deployed environment in a Trial mode and have dozens of pre-loaded task guides available. This post will tell you how.

Trial mode

When you open your Lifecycle services project, you can browse to the Cloud hosted environments. On the details pane you find some links to start AX using several cloud services, but also an option called Login to trial experience.

When you click this link, AX will be started, but you also get some additional dialogs. The first one is a question about the industry of your company and your role within the company.

When you click next, you can watch a movie what partners think of ‘AX 7’. This is a movie which was already published last year July on YouTube. You probably have seen this already. If not, this is your chance!

Now you can use the arrow to continue to the next pages. This is a real nice short summary of user experience changes in Microsoft Dynamics AX.

Finally you can click Start to open Microsoft Dynamics AX in the Trial mode. Within this mode a Getting started section will be visible on the default dashboard. This section contains many Task guides to learn using and navigating Microsoft Dynamics AX. These task guides are loaded from Lifecycle Services (LCS).

Now you can pick any task guide to open and start the guide to have a guided tour on the new Microsoft Dynamics AX.

There is more

When you deploy your cloud hosted Dynamics AX environment, you can choose which Business Proces Modeler (BPM) library should be used for the Getting started section. The default is based on the APQC Unified library. If this one is not selected, you might get an error stating that Dynamics AX cannot find the getting started library.

You can also start the trial mode by adding ?mode=trial to the URL for Dynamics AX. This will directly start the Dynamics AX preview with the Getting started section without being prompted with initial dialogs as mentioned above.

That’s all for now. Till next time!

The new Microsoft Dynamics AX (aka AX7)

A new era starts. Microsoft has released its public pre-release of the ‘new’ Microsoft Dynamics AX. This version was also code-named ‘Rainier’ and ‘AX 7’. Together with this release the information is no longer confidential. In this post I will provide some details to get access to this preview and will share my personal favorite enhanced functional features.

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