I’m curious to discuss how often users are creating trial deployments of AX 7 on Azure? Not so interested in discussing the technical aspects as much as the effort and cost related to starting a trial AX 7 instance for either training or to just deploy and discovery what kind of impact it would have on your company. Anyone have some experience with this?
Hi Jon,
What exactly would you like to hear. We use AX7 environments for learning, developing solutions and testing. When there are more users who needs to access the environment, we will most likely use a cloud hosted environment. Also downloaded VMs are used to prevent Azure costs.
I have come across customers running various instances such as CRP, DEV, TEST, PROD etc. of AX 2012. But yet to see customers embracing AX7 in Azure.
Thanks or the reply André. I’m curious to know how would you rate your experience with using Azure. It seems like what used to be free (training on an AX2012 vm) now costs the consultant or end user BA/Developer money with an Azure subscription. I agree, we’ve used downloaded VM’s as a way to offset the costs, but eventually you need to play with all of the Azure services to really get to know them in order to properly advise the client and/or boss. Have you had any issues? Are the costs appropriate? Is Microsoft supporting the onboarding of Azure to the community enough? Those sorts of questions interest me.
That’s also interesting angle to take on this discussion Harish. With AX 7 you’re given a dev instance included in your subscription but only for 6 months or something like that. I don’t have the exact figures in front of me, but I remember reading and thinking that it seemed limiting relative to the larger AX implementations Microsoft is going after. The added costs for 4 or 5 additional environments will likely drive the licensing cost of the implementation beyond just the straight count of enterprise users and AOS’s like before. Are those of you sizing AX 7 projects now running into that?
Hi Jon,
Using a MSDN subscription you get credits to spend on Azure for development/testing. Until now I could manage to not exceed the limit. Sometimes I lower the CPUs of the machine, sometimes I expect more performance and select a larger size. When you shutdown the VM on Azure when you don’t use it, the cost will be limited. Note that I’m not starting the Azure VMs daily as I do access a lot the local VM.
Hey Andre,
I did the same thing and lowered the CPUs of the machine. I ran some PowerShell script I found somewhere to change the VM to an A4 or something instead whatever the lowest option available from LCS is.
To me, the VHDs represent something similar to an on-prem instance. I think one of the biggest learning curves and changes in AX7 is the new infrastructure and how all the additional tools and parts fit. I think, when using a local VHD, some of those differences are obfuscated and you don’t get the full experience of what an Azure-hosted AX7 instance is like.
The customer I worked for chose to host their AX 2012 R3 CU9 in Azure. Previously they ran AX 2009 on premise for many years. Compared to the cost of hosting AX 2009 on premise, they found significant cost benefits hosting AX 2012 on Azure.
Interestingly during sizing the AX 2012, we bumped into limitations of LCS such as constraints on hardware spec etc. due to which we had to engage with MS directly.
Also as mentioned by Jake, we had to time limit various environments such as CRP etc. to save cost.
Overall that engagement offered fresh and first hand insights into the capabilities of Azure which was mighty impressive.