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Dynamics 365 Community / Forums / Finance | Project Operations, Human Resources, ... / AX2012 R3 Deployment A...
Finance | Project Operations, Human Resources, ...
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AX2012 R3 Deployment Architecture

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Posted on by Mandeep.S 248

Hello,

Our current AX 2012 R3 deployment 'Architecture' (not sure if it qualifies being called that!) consists of 2 physical servers - AOS and SQL DB. We service approx 60-70 users with a mix of transaction and report profiles. Both servers currently run on Xeon cores and SAS HDDs, naturally the performance is not much to talk about. 

We will be adding 10 more power users shortly and re-looking at our deployment to bring in a thought out 'Architecture' piece for which we have a small budget. To do that we are looking at hosting 2 AOS servers (with LB profile) to spread the user load. This takes care of the AOS bit.

To take care of SQL performance, is it a good practice to replicate the SQL Server (to another physical server) and point the AX report server to that? Will this help distribute the load between what is conceptually a Transaction SQL server and a Report SQL server. Or, does the overhead outweigh the performance achieved in such a scenario? 

Any tips or experience are welcome.

Note - We do not have any SAN infrastructure.

Thanks.

  • Mandeep.S Profile Picture
    Mandeep.S 248 on at
    RE: AX2012 R3 Deployment Architecture

    Hi Nikolaos,

    Thanks for replying.

    We do have a failover in place as you have suggested. While this takes care of HA, AX is always lacking in the performance department. While searching, I found this article and got inspired!

    social.technet.microsoft.com/.../32313.ax-2012-run-reports-without-hitting-the-production-db.aspx

    Do you see any pitfalls to this deployment?

  • Suggested answer
    nmaenpaa Profile Picture
    nmaenpaa 101,156 on at
    RE: AX2012 R3 Deployment Architecture

    Hi Mandeep,

    you should definetely have 2 SQL servers in a failover setup for reliability purposes. 

    But this will not add any performance since only one of the nodes is active at a time. Depending on your SQL Server tier (Standard, Enterprise) it's possible to have both nodes running at the same time, and use the second node as Read-only node for some reporting purposes. But the only AX component that supports using this secondary read-only replica is the SSAS component (=cubes). The SSRS reports can't use this secondary read-only node.

    Check this blog post for more details: community.dynamics.com/.../high-availability-best-practices-for-dynamics-ax-2012

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