Hi everyone
We run a Dynamics CRM 2016 OnPremise server in a 24/7 business environment. We have a medical call center, which needs to access the data 24/7, allthough we usually have high workload during day hours and low workload during night hours. Our clients must be able to call us any time of the day and therefore their data must always be accessible.
Right now we have a production environment and a test environment, which both run on the same physical server/hardware, but the test enivornment is rarely used and mostly for teaching new employees. Our CRM server is connected to SharePoint with the CRM solution integration (the old one, which runs as a sandboxed solution on SharePoint). We do regular backups of the CRM and SharePoint databases. We have hardware to keep our server alive for some time in case of an electric breakdown. However, if an electric breakdown for a longer time period should appear, our medical call center agents would switch to mobile phones and use pen and paper to write down the client data.
Now we're planning to implement a fallback server which is independent of our local infrastructure. The goal of that infrastructure is, that our agents are still able to work with the customer data in case our server should break (but we would still have access to the internet, maybe on a laptop with a SIM card or we move to one of our employees homes and create a temporary center until we fix the server). The fallback server would need to have more or less up to date data. In best case, the data would be replicated every hour, in worst case, every 12 or 24 hours. However, in that scenario we would only grant access to a few users and therefore not need to have a strong infrastructure. We have currently two ideas how to accomplish this:
One would be to build up a replicated environment in a second location. However, we would need to buy a server, rent a room, etc. which seems to be a bit overkill for a fallback server (specially because of the initial and the maintenance costs).
The second idea is, to replicate our environment in the cloud on Windows Azure Services. We have some experience with independent VMs in the cloud, but not with a virtual realized copy of an existing environment. I read a lot about data replication during the last few days, but every information I found about it was either about SQL server data without CRM or SharePoint or the information was very old.
Is it possible to replicate the environment in the cloud? I don't mind setting up the full environment again, as long as I can be sure that we won't run into troubles when the data replication is running. In theory, we could initially upload the VMs in Azure and would have the same environment here, with the same users in Active Directory, so after that we could replicate one SQL server to the other one. Do you think this could work?
And in a scenario like that, do we need to repurchase all the licenses again, altough it would just be a fallback replication server of our existing environment, which would rarely or maybe never really be used?
I found this article: https://community.dynamics.com/crm/f/117/t/1100
However, it's about CRM 2011 and it's more about a active duplication of a server which is being used regularly rather than a fallback server scenario. Besides that, I couldn't really find any information into our current direction.
Any alternatives to these 2 options are also highly recommended :)
Thank you!
David
