Deploy AX 2012 R3 on Azure (Preview)

Good day everyone!

Lately I have seen a growing demand from customers asking professionals with knowledge in Microsoft Azure and since  I was looking forward to set up my own MS Dynamics AX 2012 server for study and blog purposes I decided to give it a try and deploy my test enviroment on azure. Today I will show step-by-step how I did it.

Everything I have done here I did using an Azure Free Trial.

1. First of all, this is the new Azure portal face.
   
2. Click on Virtual Machines and then click on Add.
   
3. Here the portal will show a list of pre-built VMs that are ready for deployment, select Dynamics AX 2012 R3 (preview). For now, only Demo is available.
   
4. The portal will show a brief description about Dynamics AX and information about LCS. Just click in Create
5. Now we will set some information about our deploy, start by writing you Deployment name and then follow these steps:
   1. Select your subscription.
   2. Select the datacenter location.
   3. Create or select a new LCS project.
   4. If you don’t have one, click on + sign to create a new project.
   5. Write some information about you project like name and description.
   6. Click OK.
   
6. The next step is to set the Pricing Tier, which you can’t change at the moment, the server it is automatically set to use a D3, which has 4 cores and 14Gb and it costs 0,56$/hr on east US. This specs are perfect for a test enviroment and I wouldn’t change it (even if I could).
   
7. Now you have to review the pricing details and legal terms, if you agree click on Buy and then Create.
   
8. Now it will start processing, wait until it finishes.
   
9. Now, to check you project, you either click on the pin you added on the main page or you click on Browse > Dynamics Lifecycle Services projects.
   
10. Select your project, and then the portal will display informations like project name, status, LSC project, users and a list of deployment servers.  The initial status for our server is “Initializing…”, click on the server.
    
11. Click on the triple-dot and then Go to enviroment
    
12. Here we have some detailed information about our VM, our newly created VM status should be Deploying…
13. After ~45 minutes the status changed to Succeeded and it provided additional information like VM Name, username and password. Click on the VM name to access it.
    
14. To access the server use the username and domain builtin\Administrator, to know the password click on the eye next to your password.
    
15. And we are done! Now you have an enviroment ready to go with all the necessary tools like Visual Studio, Microsoft Office and more!
    

I was really surprised about how easy it was to set up a demo enviroment and this is only the tip of the iceberg! Microsoft already showed us a bit more of what there is to come on Microsoft convergence 2014 and it is amazing! Really looking forward to it.