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Dynamics 365 Community / Forums / Microsoft Dynamics CRM (Archived) / Dynamics Portal - Web ...
Microsoft Dynamics CRM (Archived)

Dynamics Portal - Web Application - Best Practice

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Posted on by Community Member

Hi

I just wanted to ask a few questions around Dynamics Portals. We have installed the self hosted installation portal for CRM On-Premise and have received a request to install the portal for another customer and also move the existing portal to a UAT environment.

Is it recommended to create a new web application server?

Our thinking is to have a single web application server with multiple web applications / portals for DEV, UAT and Production.

It has also been suggested that, for a development environment, we simply use the CRM Front End Server as the Web Application for the Portal.

I seem to think that we should have a dedicated web app server which is, in some ways, isolated from our CRM environment.

Of course, multiple web applications on a single server would be ideal as we do not want three application servers, DEV, UAT and Prod to maintain.

I just want to confirm best practice for the self hosted on premise version of Dynamics Portals.

Thanks
Tony 

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  • Verified answer
    Nicholas Hayduk Profile Picture
    Nicholas Hayduk 2,863 on at
    RE: Dynamics Portal - Web Application - Best Practice

    One other thing - I definitely don't recommend putting the Portal on your CRM server.  Best to keep it on its own server.

  • Verified answer
    Nicholas Hayduk Profile Picture
    Nicholas Hayduk 2,863 on at
    RE: Dynamics Portal - Web Application - Best Practice

    Hi Tony,

    I think technically best practice would be for each environment to have it's own server, but I agree that in many cases, it's not really practical.

    When we host portals in Azure using Web Apps, we take advantage of the free tier for dev and UAT whenever possible so that we do get separate environments.  But for cases where the portal is being hosted on-premise as well, we often use a single server with separate applications as you mentioned.  If possible, you could have a server for dev and UAT, and then another for prod, so that you can validate any environment changes (Windows updates, .NET upgrades, etc) in a separate environment before affecting prod, but in our experience we haven't run into any majors issues if all of them are hosted on the same machine.  Again, perhaps not exactly "best practice", but it has gotten the job done.

    The one thing to keep in mind is anything where the file system is being used.  The one that immediately comes to mind is the search index - if you're using the search functionality you might have a Site Setting called Search/IndexPath.  If all of your environments are using the same server, you could end up in a situation where they are all writing to the same location, and they'll overwrite each other.

    Hope that helps.

    Nick

  • Suggested answer
    Nflannery Profile Picture
    Nflannery 360 on at
    RE: Dynamics Portal - Web Application - Best Practice

    They should be on separate VM's it's the safetest way in case you need to test how any changes to the server impact the applications etc.

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