Anyone have experience with hosting GP in Azure? Just curious what VM sizing you chose, and what performance tips you might have? How hard was the migration process? Sure seems like a hot topic but I see all different kinds of recommendations out there.
Hosting GP in Azure still requires a Windows Server and a SQL installation; the pure Azure SQL doesn’t work with GP, I think it is primarily due to authentication, but others here may have more insight on that limitation. The VPN tunnel providing access to the Azure hosted site can sometimes require a network guru, but otherwise it looks and feels a lot like it does if you had it all on prem. The pay-by-the-minute thing and some other features about Azure hosting have both intrigued and bothered me at the same time.
Hi Jon, you may be interested in this post I made about delivering GP via the web… This vid shows GP delivered thru a web page which is sitting on an Azure server. Although the server is OS and SQL in one, it’s only for demo so you would need to extend that depending on the number of users etc… https://www.linkedin.com/posts/robert-hyndman-seventeen_dynamics-gp-in-the-cloud-activity-6745477034807570432-874z
Great feedback Robert. I was thinking more of the backend side of things, and how to get off of aged hardware. But the access and frontend is certainly a question too. Great tips!
Yes exactly David. So do you have an average cost per month you’ve seen? Also how’s performance?
Hi [mention:2ad34ff1156d42a08f485895ed755b65:e9ed411860ed4f2ba0265705b8793d05],
I’ve moved a few customers now from on-prem GP to the Azure cloud, in varying sizes, but mostly SMB’s. In one case I took over a setup that was done by another partner and it was completely overkill for what the customer needed, ending up in paying a monthly bill of 3.5k$ whereas they could have easily got away with less than half of that monthly spending.
The first big mistake was to select a SQL Enterprise version for something that wasn’t justified, paying upfront twice or three times the monthly license cost for SQL, which is ridiculous. Second, the former partner setup 3 VM’s where 2 would have been enough for only 4-5 GP users… Again, overkill and lack of knowledge on how the system operates and what GP needs in terms of resources.
Two other customers I moved to hosted platform were identical in size and their monthly bill is way less than 1k$. I also noticed that many times the VM’s are over-sized when setting up the initial configuration… The essence of Azure is to able to easily scale up or down once you started with it, and IMHO it’s easier to scale up, especially when it comes to storage space.
LMK if you want more details.
Hi [mention:72183239922e481d91d36459cdd3a005:e9ed411860ed4f2ba0265705b8793d05],
I would appreciate some info if you have time. I’m planning a migration to Azure and I’m having a hard time sizing, or even forecasting, the VM size/budget.
Thanks for your help
HI @huntmknox,
No problem… shoot me an e-mail to info at gp-geek.com
Provide me as much information as possible on the GP & SQL versions, the number of users and number of concurrent GP licenses.