Dynamics 365 Retail – Deploying Retail Cloud Scale Unit

Introduction

As you might have heard and as discussed in one of my previous blog posts, in the October 2018 release, Microsoft released the concept of Retail Cloud Scale Unit (RCSU). As already discussed, this specific feature does not intrinsically bring any new functional features to the table but it is more the first step in the re-organisation of the Retail Stack topology for a company which is already live with Dynamics 365 Retail for its Retail workloads.

Having said this, there is still a good amount of activities to plan around making this topology transformation and, in my opinion, the effort is worth the while since the result of the effort will be a more performing and scalable cloud topology for your retail deployment.

The activities which need to be taken in relation to this exercise can be split into three main areas:

1. Pre-deployment
2. During deployment
3. Post deployment

It is important to understand that your deployment effort is two-fold. First the whole process has to be tried and tested on your Tier 2 SAT environment and when all is tested and stable, the process needs to be done on the production environment.

All the above can be summarised using the following diagram:

Let’s have a high level look at each of these three phases.

Pre-deployment activities

Before planning to start the RCSU deployment, you should ensure that your Dynamics 365 retail implementation meets the necessary prerequisites. Your AOS/HQ should, at the time of writing be running in one of the following Azure regions:

(a)    US: East, East 2, West, central, South Central

(b)    Europe: North, West, North Central, France Central, France South

(c)     Australia: East, South East

(d)    Asia: East, South East

Also, your environments must have application version 8.1.2.x or higher so that you can go through this transformation, so this is another activity you would have to plan with your technical team prior to initializing the deployment, if you are running on a lower app version.

Of course, before the Partner and I.T. department start working on this upgrade there should be transparent communication with all the stakeholders within the company to make them aware of the effort required from the different teams and the down-times expected on both the SAT and the Production environments. There should also be plans in place to start the validation and smoke testing of the new deployment so that these activities can start once the deployment transformation is complete. Microsoft recommend to plan for at 5 hour down-time for your retail stores and for online retail server operations. Theoretically, there shouldn’t be any down-time for the ERP back-office / HQ work-loads during this process. If you have an on-prem Retail Store Scale Unit (not to be confused with the Retail Cloud Scale Unit as discussed in my previous blog post) deployed inside your brick and mortar store or your POS has offline functionality configured then your store could continue working with limited functionality (retail time operations via Retail-Server will still not work). The same does not apply to any e-Commerce work-loads of course, as these usually always need connectivity to the Retail Server. If your e-Commerce solution communicates directly with your Retail Headquarter then you might be in luck but it would be better to confirm with your ISV vendor if their product architecture gets affected with this deployment upgrade.

Besides planning for downtime, before starting the second phase, you should also ensure that:

(a)    All POS shifts are closed

(b)    All retail scheduler jobs are completed and the recurrence temporarily removed

(c)     Log out of all POS sessions

During deployment activities

Once all stakeholders are informed and prepared, any technical tasks required have been performed and all shifts, jobs and sessions have ended you can go ahead and initialize the deployment, starting with your SAT environment of course. This can be done by logging in to LCS, creating a new support request with Microsoft specifying “Enable retail cloud scalability”. If all prerequisites have been met, within around five business days, users with “Project administrator” role in your LCS project will be granted access to initialize the feature. Once you are white-listed to use this feature you have to click on the “Manage” button within the new “Retail” tile in the environment management workspace and from within there you enable retail cloud scalability. This can be seen in the screenshot below but do not try to look for it in your LCS environment because, as I said earlier in this paragraph, you will only see this after you get white-listed to enable retail cloud scalability.

At this point, the clock starts ticking for the five hour down-time. During this down-time, as discussed above, your HQ, your RSSUs and your offline functionality should remain unaffected. Keep in mind that anything needing the Retail Server such as real time calls (such as customer orders, coupons, inventory lookups etc) won’t work but cash and carry transactions should work normally.

Post deployment activities

Once the deployment of RCSU has been successful, there are some activities which still need to be performed, the most important of which is, of course, execution of validation and smoke testing which should have been planned for the in the pre-deployment phase. The good news is that you do not have to re-activate your Retail POS device (activation is preserved) and no changes need to be done to any on-prem hardware stations you might have in your retail store. The bad news is that data that existed within POS reports prior to the RCSU deployment will be lost.

Once you are happy with the validation and result of the smoke test you can repeat the above LCS procedure from within LCS for the production environment, again keeping in mind the down-time, the limitations discussed above.

If your RCSU is successful then welcome to the world of more cloud scalability, more resource governance and load isolation and reduced downtime for updates as now your HQ and your retail work-loads are running on different servers.

Happy Retailing with Microsoft Dynamics 365 and hold tight for more exciting updates in this area of cloud scalability for Retail!