Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013 R2 VM Image available on Azure

This is cool! So useful! And already announced on the NAV Team Blog! And it’s for all MSDN Subscribers .. .

May be first explain what that MSDN-thingy means… . Many partners have MSDN. At least partners that are a little bit serious in what they are doing .. being able to explore the new technical bits and bytes of the products they earn money with .. in our case “Microsoft Products”. Or how Microsoft puts it: “The MSDN subscription gives you the well-known discounted prices and allows you to use it for development, test, and demo purposes, but not for production purposes.”

Cool, so for about all NAV partners .. something new is available in Azure:

The Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013 R2 Virtual Machine Image in Azure

That’s a mouthful, isn’t it ;-)? But it’s exactly what it says it is. And it means: just a few mouse clicks, and you’ll have a deployed Windows 2012 (not R2) machine with NAV 2013 R2 pre-installed, in Azure – an all that in just a few minutes! How to use it, is pretty much explained on the Team blog, so I’ll try to add some new information .. like screenshots :-):

Create a new Machine:

From a Gallery:

Navigate to the one that contains NAV 2013 R2 on a Windows Server 2012:

Fill in some basic fields:

Next, Next, Next, … Finish.

And here you go, Azure is provisioning your machine:

And a few minutes (rather 10) later:

And that’s it! Ready to use your machine. First thing you do, is obviously log into your machine with the “connect” button:

When you are logged in, Microsoft guides you to this webpage, which is a perfect guide to get started with the VM. There is one thing, that would make is somewhat more interesting .. . What if I could …

make the webclient available from anywhere

Working with NAV from within the machine (with RDP) is easy. There are links on the desktop that you can use to navigate to the different parts. But how to access the web client from my own pc?

It wouldn’t be Azure if this would be difficult to do :-). All we need to do, is add an endpoint. In the provided shortcut (on the VM’s desktop), you see that there is this default URL for the webclient: https://localhost/NAV/WebClient . So let’s try to create the HTTPS endpoint, by navigating to the properties of my new VM in Azure:

Let’s add a stand-alone endpoint and choose HTTPS from the drop-down:

That’s it! Wait for the endpoint, and go to the corresponding URL from your own PC! To compose the correct URL, you can find the DNS name in your Dashboard:

So in my case, the URL would be: https://nav2013r2-vm.cloudapp.net/NAV/WebClient. As this NST works with Windows Credentials, you’ll have this popup. Please put “MicrosoftAccount” in front of your username .. Provide password, and there you go:

In let’s say 20 minutes, you’re able to log into your own VM, your own deployed-into-the-cloud-NAV-2013-R2-Web-Client-which-is-available-from-anyware… .