Test driving D365 Retail Cloud Scale Unit (RCSU)

Following my previous blog posts where I described upcoming features and deployment strategy of D365 RCSU, the feature has now been made generally available in the April 2019 release of D365-FO (AX10).

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/business-applications-release-notes/april19/dynamics365-retail/

Of course, first steps would be to test drive RCSU deployment on a test environment via LCS following the official Microsoft Docs guide.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/unified-operations/dev-itpro/deployment/initialize-retail-channels

Turns out it was quite a smooth experience.

After Microsoft support activate the feature for you, you will get a Retail: "Manage" button under environment details. 

There you will get an "RCSU not initlaised" message and you can trigger the process which will present you a slider dialog to choose the Azure Data Region where to deploy your RCSU (which can be your HQ region, of course) and to opitonally deploy an extension to Retail Server. Please note that not all Azure Data regions currently support hosting of D365 Retail workloads at time of writing (at time of writing).

You click on the "Initialise" button and you will get the typical LCS confirmation dialog box and click OK there as well after double checking the details.

After that, you will get into a new screen where you can monitor the progress of your RCSU deployment. For me, deploying into same reason as HQ and with no extensions to install, the process took around two hours. Changing those variables might affect deployment time.

When the process is completed, the screen above should now look as follows.

Congratulations! You have successfully deployed Dynamics 365 Retail Cloud Scale Unit via LCS.

Now to the next critical step: Testing! :-)

Happy Retailing in D365!