This post will cover my experience running the data upgrade process in D365. As someone who likes to learn by doing, I have made many mistakes running our data upgrade. Hopefully this post will highlight some of the mistakes I have made so that you do not have to. In no particular order lets get started.
Cloud-Hosted Development Environment required(or on-prem)
This will be a repeating theme thoughout this post, Microsoft’s documentation on this is not exactly clear. You will need either a cloud-hosted or on-prem development environment to complete the data upgrade process. This is for two reasons, first you will need local admin acccess, and second you will need to adjust the amount of the storage in the development environment.
Pay Attention the version of the Cloud-Hosted environment you deploy
Don’t get excited and deploy the latest and greatest version of D365, the data upgrade package may not be availible for the version you selected. As of this writing the latest D365 version is 10.10 and the latest upgrade package is for 10.9. Yet another full redeploy.
Set the size of your Cloud-Hosted environment correctly the first time.
When you deploy a cloud-hosted environment you have the option of setting the size and number of virtual disks the environment will use. Do this by selecting the advanced button when choosing the environment size. I found it impossible to change the drive size after the environment was deployed. You can change the VM Disk size in Azure but changing the storage pool in Windows is difficult. Choose the disk size ahead of time and save yourself another full redeploy.
Run SQL Service as Local Admin
The documentation says to run the SQL Server service as axlocaladmin which didn’t make sense to me. You need to run the service as the local admin account that is provisioned via LCS. This will indeed speed up your database restore, by a lot.
No Warning on Database Synchronization
In AX2012 when you run a database synchronization you get a prompt about half-way through the process detailing what changes are about to made to the data schema, this if you accidentally change the schema in an unexpected way. In D365 there is no prompt, the changes are just made and you are notified of changes once they are complete. This issue has caused me one db restore so far.
