Creating a Dataverse Instance in the Desired Location

Creating environments in the Power Platform Admin Center is easy, you just need to provide a name, a type, decide if you want a database or not, chose if you want to pay-as-you-go and a region. This last choice is the one that I am going to be covering today.

The Power Platform Admin Center provides multiple regions where you can create an environment. These regions match the concept of geographies in Azure. But Azure also has the concept of region, where an Azure region is defined as a geographical area that contains one or more data centers that are used to host Azure services. This means that one Azure geography can contain multiple regions within. For a detailed list of Azure’s regions, you can follow this link: Choose the Right Azure Region for You | Microsoft Azure.

When you are creating a new environment in the Power Platform Admin Center, this provides you with a simplified view of the geographies where you can deploy it, this means that you can pick the geography but the exact region or location of your instance, will be determined by Azure based on the resources available among all the regions in the selected geography.

In most of cases, this is not an issue. You will have your environment in the geography you selected. But there are some exceptions like in the following example: you have deployed your environment to the desired geography, let’s say Canada, and now you want to connect it to Synapse Link; which requires an Azure storage account that must be located in the same region, and now I am talking Azure region, as your Power Apps Environment. If for some reason, you are required to have all your Azure resources in the ”Canada Central” region,  but your Power Apps environment was deployed in “Canada East” then you have a few options:

1. Open a ticket from the Power Platform Admin Center, “Help + support” option to request moving your environment from one region to the other.
2. Create your environment again in the right region, but how? Since the Power Platform Admin Center doesn’t offer that choice.

Fortunately, there is an option to create all your Power Apps environments in the desired region from the beginning and that is provided by the PowerApps administration module: Microsoft.PowerApps.Administration.PowerShell Module | Microsoft Learn.

Once you have installed this package on your machine, you can use a couple of useful cmdlets:

Get-AdminPowerAppEnvironmentLocations: this one, will let you know what are the Azure regions where you can deploy. Invoking this one is easy, just type the name of the cmdlet in PowerShell and you will get a list as the one displayed on the image below (take into account that you will be asked to authenticate):

The yellow rectangle shows the Azure regions within the geographies (shown on the first column -LocationName-).

Once you have found the Azure region where you want your environment to be deployed, in my example I picked “canadacentral”, you can move to the next cmdlet.

New-AdminPowerAppEnvironment: this is the one that actually creates the environment, and here you need to provide the Azure region that you selected (from the yellow rectangle on the image) in the RegionName parameter, as show in the example below:

• New-AdminPowerAppEnvironment -DisplayName ‘myEnvironment’ -Description 'PowerShell Created Environment' -ProvisionDatabase   -Location 'canada'-RegionName canadacentral -EnvironmentSku Sandbox -DomainName $environmentname -LanguageName 1033  -CurrencyName CAD -Templates D365_CustomerService -WaitUntilFinished $true

Please notice how I have specified the “Location”, which matches the Azure geography and then the Azure region in the “RegionName” parameter.

After executing the New-AdminPowerAppEnvironment cmdlet with the region name specified, your environment will be created in the specific Azure region you need it to be.