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I'm wondering if anyone has seen/found a single good reference article/blog/doc on best practices deployment of CRM 2016 on-prem, using a 7-server model. Specifically:
1 - SQL 2014 server
2 - SSRS 2014 server
3 - Deployment admin server
4 - Front end server
5 - Back end server
6 - Secondary DC with AD FS
7 - AD FS Proxy
I just upgraded us from 2011 (which was a legacy 3, then 4 upgrade), to 2013, 2015 and finally 2016 (it's been a LONG week) and have done my best to plan, prepare and read everything I could understand to prepare for this. Although CRM deployment and admin is not my full time job, I'm happy that we're upgraded but am still a bit lost with things I don't deal with daily - like SSL certs, SSRS and AD FS.
We are currently deployed with items 1-5 above and everything works fine. Getting SSRS setup off SQL was a bit of a challenge but it's done.
What's got me stumped now is SSL, so that we can get at the encryption keys in CRM. I've been able to set it up from our AD domain CA when I had CRM deployed on a single server (I know I'll need a public cert for IFD but right now I just want to prove I can make it work and get at the CRM key). But as soon as I set up the distributed model above, and went through the exact same series of steps that worked when IIS was on 1 server, but on 2 (Front & Deployment Admin), I started getting 503 Service Unavailable (app pool) errors. Nothing I tried or read fixed it - dedicated service accounts in place, passwords good, certs are fine, bindings good, but app pool kept stopping. As soon as I put the back end and deployment admin Roles back on a single server, problem solved. SSL worked and no more app pool errors. But that's not the distributed model I'm trying to deploy above. And no documentation I could find helped make it clear why this might be happening, but only when the servers were distributed.
As I read the MS CRM 2016 planning guide (and MANY other resources), I see designs for multi-server deployment but not specifically where they have a clear guidebook for *true* distribution, with SSRS isolated from SQL, and each of the 3 primary CRM roles distributed. If it's there, I haven't found it. I've seen a lot of theoretical stuff (TECHNET) but no single resource that brings all the steps together.
My goal here is not redundancy - it's performance. So I'd also appreciate any input/perspective from anyone who's done this and seen the results. I'm at a point of frustration and burnout where I'm considering collapsing our deployment and not having to deal with these complexities. When I had CRM on a single server + SQL, it was relatively easy. And I don't even want to begin to imagine what I have to look forward to with IFD (never done it before).
Even with SSRS isolated, reports still take far longer to come up than I'd like or expect with the load being distributed like this (seems same as when SSRS was running on SQL), and honestly, I don't see any difference from having SSRS on the SQL server. But the I/G stated this could improve performance so I thought I'd give it a go. I'm wondering if I missed something - it works so I'm thinking no, but I'd really like to see a best practices checklist from someone who's actually done this and done it optimally. And not necessarily for a gazillion users - my team is small but I still want to give them the best possible performance.
Thank you in advance for any references, perspective, etc.
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