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Dynamics 365 Community / Forums / Microsoft Dynamics GP (Archived) / Environment for large,...
Microsoft Dynamics GP (Archived)

Environment for large, multi-company installation

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Posted on by Zara 120

We  have a customer that is getting the setup started on their company installations.   They have 135 users licenses.  As we have found out they are needing to have 5 different instances of GP, due to special modifications in the forms/reports/dictionaries.  We know that this would mean different dynamics.set files and different SQL  instances for the tables etc. They also want the ability to upgrade to different versions/service packs so that they can stage these events over a time frame of 60 days or so.

 

Our questions are:  what do you think would be a best practice for setup? and is there anything that we are missing?

*This post is locked for comments

  • Sohrab Syed Profile Picture
    Sohrab Syed 5 on at
    Re: Environment for large, multi-company installation

    Hi,

    We are planning to setup/deploy hosted GP (multi-tenant) in HA environment and would like to know what options are available with GP 10. The infrastructure is planned for 200+ concurrent users (an average of 15 to 20 users per customer/client). We need to have some load-balancing at the front-end using TS/RDS and the back-end would be Clustered SQL (Active/Passive). The software licensing is not an issue as we are a Microsoft SPLA Partner. Now the questions are:

    1. Can we consider using TS/RDS server farm for load-balancing and redundancy of GP application

    2. Are there any specific requirements to setup GP on TS/RDS two server farm

    3. How can we set up a separate instance of GP for every client on the TS/RDS server farm (2 servers) and what are the best practices

    4. Can TS/RDS load-balancing handle the GP application user's sessions and reconnnect in case of any TS/RDS server failure in the farm and what is the impact otherwise

    5. On the back-end, can we setup multiple instances of SQL 2008 R2 in an Active/Passive cluster (one SQL instance for each GP application instance)

    6. How do we setup the reporting services options either using SSRS or 3rd party component.

    This is all I can think of now, but appreciate if you could highlight anything we have missed and guide us on the options available.

    Thank you.

    Sohrab

  • Frank Hamelly | MVP, MCP, CSA Profile Picture
    Frank Hamelly | MVP... 4,029 Super User 2024 Season 2 on at
    Re: Environment for large, multi-company installation

    As usual Ian, you are the man!  Great advice to Zara's question.

    Best regards,

  • Community Member Profile Picture
    Community Member Microsoft Employee on at
    Re: Environment for large, multi-company installation

    Hi Zara, no problem, that's what the forum is for.

    5 companies? 135 users? and its a brand new install?...I would say that staging the upgrades would be un-neccessary. Unless its a 24 hour business - ie they have offices across all time zones, and for a very critical business reason they need zero downtime.

    Most of the upgrade work can be prepared in a test enviornment - leaving the downtime to just how long it takes the Data to convert - and once the server is well specced it should be fast enough (or indeed take the live data off onto another standalone machine in order to update it (I've run upgrades on my laptop in half the time it took to run on the clients big pro-liant server!! Can't figure that one but when an upgrade is crawling, we now try it on any other machine available and sometimes it zips along))

    Just one minor point - the will not be able to mange the user counts across multiple instances of GP - each instance would be licenced seperately and would have a set user count.

    Out of pure nosiness - give us an update when all is decided.

    Best regards,

    Ian.

  • Zara Profile Picture
    Zara 120 on at
    Re: Environment for large, multi-company installation

    Ian,

    I truly appreciate your response.  Our tech representative at Microsoft has asked me to post our question here, as he felt the forum advisors would of of great help to us.  Your response is more of what I was needing!  Yes, you are correct, the different instances would be for the purpose of staging upgrades/SP.

    The customer, for whatever reason, feels that upgrading all of the instances of GP at once would be a timing/resource problem.  They are going to have 5 companies, all with different customized code, so different set files, report.dic and custom report.dic.  I know that us installing the different instances of GP, the different custom code upgrades and then upgrading SP and etc would be managable.  I also know that having them all under the same instance on the SQL server would be managable as well. Only 135 users and 5 GP company db's would be managable as well.

    They will have a terminal server environment for the purpose of load balancing.  I know they would be able to control the user access to the different instances of GP.  

    I will review your information some more and pass it along to management here to talk with our customer about.  Your ideas and input are greatly valued and will be put into consideration of possibilites.

    It is good to know that you are able to do the 60 companies and have it all be in one GP and take a day and half.  Kuddos to you and your team!

    Again, thank you.

  • Community Member Profile Picture
    Community Member Microsoft Employee on at
    Re: Environment for large, multi-company installation

    Just adding to the pot.

    You need to question why you would want to stage your upgrades...if it is the only reason that you want to put GP on multiple instances of SQL (Did I understand correctly). Under your EULA you cannot have GP installed on multiple servers - the only way you could achieve this is to purchase multiple GP application licences - each talking to a single database. (I.e. Purchase GP complete a number of times over). And if you do this, you will have to decide how many user licence seats reside in each instance of GP. Your investment is going to multiply many times if you want to do this.

    In terms of wanting multiple forms / reports etc.  - I have found that Terminal Server is probably the best solution - you can centrally manage a number of GP installs on the one TS machine (in your case probably multiple TS machines given the user count - but if anything, that would make managing the various installs of GP easier) - each with its own dynamics.set file, its own dex.ini file, its own reports and forms dictionaries etc etc. - and you choose which one to publish for which user.

    You could of course maintain each users Install on the local PC - just gets a small bit complicated when it comes to rolling out updates / upgrades.

    You could also think about a virtual workstation enviornment with Group Policy roll out. This makes life a whole lot easier to manage things like ODBC connections, GP application files etc. I have one customer and its probably the best set up I have ever been involved in, in termsof managing their GP clients / rolling out upgrades / service packs etc.

    How many companies are we talking about? How big would the databases be? I'm completing an upgrade for 60 companies in a single install of GP this weekend. The users will stay out of the live environment tomorrow and should be in testing come monday morning. The only reason we are taking Friday is to give us an extra day just in case. The test upgrade we did in a day and a half complete.

    Let us know your final decisions.

    Best regards,

    Ian.

  • Zara Profile Picture
    Zara 120 on at
    Re: Environment for large, multi-company installation

    Thank you for your response.  We have decided to go a different route to get some help on this.

    Thank you.

  • Suggested answer
    Frank Hamelly | MVP, MCP, CSA Profile Picture
    Frank Hamelly | MVP... 4,029 Super User 2024 Season 2 on at
    Re: Environment for large, multi-company installation

    That's way too broad a question for a forum because of the myriad details that go into such an implementation.  You would do well to contract with an adviser who has performed a number of complex implementations.  Someone who has been there, done that, and has the T-shirt.  Only with a thorough review of the customer's requirements could valid recommendations be made.

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