The data upgrade process from AX 2012 to D365 has been improved, reducing the cutover time period during the upgrade.
To enable this feature, the on-prem AX 2012 database has to be replicated to a Self service environment. This process uses SQL Transactional Replication to bring the schema and data from the AX 2012 on-premises database to the sandbox environment.
Replication is a set of technologies for copying and distributing data and database objects from one database to another, and then synchronizing between the databases to maintain consistency. This migration and copying happens with the source system online, which means there is no need for Finance and Operations service downtime during the replication process. The Online Database Migration Toolkit uses transactional replication. This is typically used in server-to-server scenarios that require high-throughput to improve scalability and availability.
The Online Database Migration Toolkit can be downloaded from Lifecycle Services (LCS) in Shared asset Library > Model.
- While executing the AX2012DataMigration.exe the setup process will prompt you to sign in , please use the LCS sign in credentials. This will authenticate the service to talk to your sandbox environment.
- The second step in the process is prompt you to enter the Project Id & Environment Id. This helps to exactly identify your sandbox.
- Enable replication. This step will ask for the source server name, Source database name, SQL User name of the source DB, SQL password for the source DB, the IP address of the source DB so the source server can be whitelisted in the sandbox to enable communication between the source & target system.
Please use the public IP. Since the process is utilizing the standard SQL database replication process please refer to the SQL Server Replication - SQL Server | Microsoft Docs for any doubts related to the SQL replication.
Hope this helps clarify few of your questions.
The AX 2012 to D365 upgrade tool should be installed in your AX 2012 environment. The first step in the setup process will re