First the great news: Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 has been officially released today, on October 8th 2013! Not only can you sign up for a brand new Fall ’13 trial environment in CRM Online but you can also download the on-premises bits for the RTM release (build number 06.00.0000.0809). Here are the download links:
Microsoft Dynamics CRM Server 2013
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=40341
Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 Language Packs
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=40340
Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 Email Router
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=40342
Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 Report Authoring Extension (with SQL Server Data Tools support)
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=40343
Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 for Microsoft Office Outlook (Outlook Client)
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=40344
Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 List Component for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 and Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 (for multiple browsers)
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=40345
Servers in the cloud
Now then, what should we do with these shiny new CRM 2013 bits? If you haven’t got any spare hardware lying around but you do have an active MSDN subscription, then why not leverage the subscriber benefits and set up a development/test server in Windows Azure? It’s easy, it’s fast, and if you have the MSDN credits, it’s also FREE!
The discounted rates for MSDN subscribers make it up to 97% cheaper to run a virtual machine on Azure compared to the standard rates, leaving the cost at only $0.06 per hour for a VM (small instance). Combine this with the fact that Azure VM’s are nowadays charged by the minute and they incur no charges when the VM is stopped, you can stretch a few $ worth of Azure credits for quite a long period of testing. If you haven’t yet looked into the MSDN benefits, go and read this article on Scott Guthrie’s blog for all the details.
Not only does MSDN provide you with free credits to spend on your favorite Azure service, you can also leverage the MSDN usage rights for software running on a Windows Azure virtual machine. For a great review of the licensing options for setting up Dynamics CRM development and test environments by using MSDN, look no further than this recent blog post by Leon Tribe.
Preparing a development server for CRM 2013
While you can’t just directly provision an Azure VM image pre-configured with CRM 2013 (at least not yet), you can skip a few steps by starting with an image from the Azure VM Gallery that comes with SQL Server 2012. You will need to setup Active Directory and IIS before starting the CRM 2013 server installation, which requires a set of clicks and a couple of reboots.
To make this process faster, I decided to take notes of the steps needed in installing the required components for CRM 2013 and share them with anyone who’s interested in doing the same. So, here’s a 50 slide presentation with screenshots of the configuration tasks and options to install a working CRM 2013 dev/test/demo server on a Windows Azure VM:
Do take note of this fact before proceeding any further: this is NOT the “how to” of deploying a live CRM 2013 server. These are the minimum steps needed to get the Dynamics CRM server installation process to complete without errors – nothing more. When considering setting up a proper test and production environment, the first thing you need to do is read the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 Implementation Guide.
For taking CRM 2013 on a casual test drive and seeing what your current CRM 2011 organization looks like when imported into the latest server version, the steps outlined in the presentation are all you need to get started. I’ve timed the process and the last time it took around 1.5 hours from provisioning a new VM from the Azure Gallery to having a fully working test instance of CRM 2013 in the cloud. Not quite the couple of minutes that spinning up a new CRM Online organization takes, but short enough to set up an ad-hoc test environment for development and configuration tasks that are more easily accomplished with full CRM server and SQL database access.
Great article Jukka. Made me think about Azure in more detail than I have before. Thanks.
There are a couple of gotcha’s I found using the Windows Azure SQL images for RC1:
1) They really chew through your usage credits – especially if you choose enterprise edition (ouch!). I beleive the MSDN usage rights now enable you to use one of your MSDN SQL licences for this.
2) They are built with US regional settings and this means (beleive it or not) that even with SQL 2012 the server collation is set to a (depricated) SQL collation for the US. If you are outside of the US it won’t be what you are expecting so if you’re going to use SQL server for anything else you might want to change the server collation before you go too far. (it’s much harder once you’ve created user databases).
With RC1 I also had a problem with the defaul service accounts for SQL (the SQL installer sets these to Virtual Accounts by default so this is what the image uses). With RC1 the CRM installer couldn’t handle these for both SQL database services and SQL Reporting Services and I had to set them to a domain user account (as in CRM 2011). Wondering if they fixed this or it’s simply missing from the slides?
Finally I think there’s something about having to set the DNS resolver settings (e.g. for the DC to point to itself for DNS resolution) when you create the Azure VM (which you can only do with PowerShell….) or you may loose these settings during Azure “service healing”. I used an Azure Virtual Network so maybe things are slightly different?
Great insights, Simon, thanks for sharing! The collation setting and DNS resolver are something worth paying attention to if you plan on preserving the environment and performing continuous development and testing. So far I’ve only used them for disposable CRM 2013 environments for every new Beta release, but now with RTM available it is of course easier to build the environment only once and configure it with this in mind.
Regarding the credit consumption, if I take a SQL image from the gallery that supports the MSDN offer, then the cost per hour is the $0.06, multiplied based on the size of the VM of course. Below is an example of a SQL 2012 Enterprise Medium VM that I’ve left running 24/7 and the resulting credit consumption from this environment. After 3 weeks of usage I’ve burned through 928.27 compute hours for €41.48 and €4.25 for 60 GB of storage.
As for the service accounts, I did mention on slide 30 changing the SRSS to run as Local System. I didn’t encounter any errors for the SQL database services, though, when installing RC1.
I think the difference is the exact subscription?
If you get your MSDN subscription via an MPN Action Pack as I do you don’t get the MSDN Azure benefit. You can however get Azure benefits via the MPN Cloud Essentials program and I had assumed the pricing was similar. Clearly it isn’t – I chewed through £75 worth (just compute time) of the double credit for the first month in only a few days when I selected SQL Enterprise. The Azure pricing calculator is really unclear if it’s telling me pricing for my subscription or the standard pricing but SQL Standard appears as $0.64/hr and SQL Enterprise $2.19 (both on A1) so it can mount up pretty quickly especially with SQL Enterprise.
As for the service account I didn’t read slide 30 properly looking instead at side 32 where it is still showing a virtual account in use. With RC1 I think I may have been mislead by someone else’s post about this in the beta program and set the SQL database services to a domain user account before I ran the CRM installer? (I can’t remember now). With the report connector install I’d left the SSRS service account alone but as you say it moans about that.
If your Action Pack includes MSDN licenses for SQL Server then I wonder if you could then leverage those licenses on an Azure VM? When you deploy a SQL Server VM image then the cost of the software is baked into the hourly rate and the cost obviously rises up quite a bit. Since you’re probably not using a commercial license for CRM in the dev VM, then I assume SQL could also be installed on top of the plain Windows Server VM image using the same kind of licenses for the DB as for the application.
That’s what I did in the end but it’s not clear if it’s 100% legitimate. You’re supposed to have licence mobility to run on-premise licences on Azure and normally you’d get that with Software Assurance. The new MSDN Azure benefit explicitly gives you this now – it’s not clear if similar Azure partner benefits do also. As it was a time-limited beta I didn’t worry too much for RC1.
Honestly I think I’ve learnt more about Windows Azure in the last month or so than I have about CRM 2013…
Hi,
Great Post.. thanks.
I have one question. Using this approach is it possible to IFD enable CRM running on Azure?
Pat, I have not tested deploying a single server development box with IFD, but in theory this should be possible. You can have a look at this article by Adam Vero on considerations for having both CRM and ADFS running on the same server.
Jukka,
I followed the set up guide to the T and got the Azure environment up and running on the third trials. I sure learned a lot from the set up.
My problem is not with the server, but with the client. I set up the client/root certificate per the Microsoft guide and I was able to get the IIS page (port 80), but not the CRM page on port 5555. I already disabled all the firewalls on the client and opened up the end point on the VM. Would a client connection be possible without an IFD set up? thanks.
Sherman, if you’re talking about the web client then I have managed to connect to an Azure VM in the past from my browser, with no IFD enabled. That was an earlier CRM version and I haven’t tested this very recently, but off the top of my head I can’t think of a change in the product’s architecture that should cause any issues here. Outlook will probably never work without an actual IFD implementation, but I’ll need to try the browser connection on a more recent Azure VM when I get the chance.
Unfortunately not able to connect my Visual Studio to this development CRM server created in Azure VM. I have posted this question in below forum, please take a look at it and suggest what I need to do to be able to do to connect visual studio to this CRM Server? Thanks, Prasad
https://community.dynamics.com/crm/f/117/p/155705/366152.aspx#366152
How the users will access Dynamics CRM deployed on Azure virtual machine, the users machine is not in the same same network of Azure.
As long as the virtual machine name can be resolved from the public internet, there shouldn’t be a problem accessing the CRM web client from any machine. I haven’t built a CRM VM in Azure for a couple of years, though (CRM Online is so convenient these days), so you’ll have to search for the latest guidance on how the Azure network configuration should be set for the VM.