In this blog post, I would like to summarize the best practices to ensure High Availability (HA) for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R3. This has been a critical subject for many customers because Dynamics AX is a mission-critical business application meaning that any downtime impacting end users will result in financial loss.Business continuity doesn't come for free: it requires additional components, configurations and maintenance. So, before you engage yourself into a complete redesign of your architecture, first define the right level of uptime needed for your application and which service is critical: for example, you can define Dynamics AX client as business critical but not the financial reporting. Service Level Agreement (SLA) can be defined for every scenario and can help you decide the best option to choose from.Below we are focusing on the. However, for the hardware and platform layers, we do recommend virtualization to provide additional capabilities. Also, we are not covering all workloads of the product such as Retail and Enterprise Portal. Operational database High AvailabilityThere are two important Dynamics AX databases: the one hosting the the business data and the one for the code and metadata.
Both are critical for the application and must always be available. If the Dynamics AX AOS cannot connect to these databases, it will simply stop running.Solution: SQL Server (AOAG). By putting the critical databases in one Availability Group and with the, you allow an automatic failover from the Primary Replicas to the Secondary Replicas. To avoid the Primary Replicas node to be a new single point of failure (SPOF), you should as the entry point for all services: Dynamics AX Server Configuration Utility for the Application Object Server (AOS), SQL Server Reporting Services and Management Reporter Service configuration.Tips: Please also ensure the service account running thedatabases (Primary and all Secondary replicas).Limitation: Secondary Replicas are Read only and therefore cannot be used for standard Dynamics AX 2012 Reporting Services.
Microsoft Dynamics GP is a mid-market business accounting software or ERP software package marketed in North and South America, UK and Ireland, the Middle East, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand. It is used in many additional countries with partner supported localizations. It uses either Microsoft SQL Server 2005, 2008, 2012, 2014 or 2016 to store data.
So Management Reporter Data Mart, Retail and Entity Store must still point to Primary Replicas databases. However, ad hoc SSRS reports not using the data provider class and standard Dynamics AX 2012 Business Intelligence objects support the Secondary Replicas: you need to create a to route 'read only' queries to the Secondary Replicas.Note: there is a possible performance impact on Dynamics AX when Synchronous mode is used, for example when heavy batch jobs are running.
The scale of this impact depends on how fast the transactions can be committed to the secondary replica so the quality of the connection between Primary and Secondary replica is crucial for best performance. Dynamics AX AOS High AvailabilityThe Dynamics AX clients are connecting to the AOS servers using the Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) protocol. They are connecting to the TCP port (default 2712) of the AOS servers.Solution: Setup an application Cluster containing all AOS instances in System admin Setup System Cluster configuration. The first AOS in the client configuration utility will load balance all incoming sessions so that same number of sessions are hosted on each AOS of the cluster.Scenario: when one AOS service is becoming unavailable, the sessions running on that AOS will be stopped automatically but each user will be able to start his client by clicking the same shortcut.
What Is Dynamics Ax 2012
The shortcut is calling the Dynamics AX client with the configuration file that contains all AOS included in the cluster.Tips: You can create to be the single point of contact for new connections. This can be beneficial when there are many Business Connector calls. 3. Dynamics AX Services High AvailabilityAnother communication between Dynamics AX client and AOS are the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) calls, for example the Reporting Services workload.
WCF services are hosted on WSDL port (default 8101) and a service endpoint port (default 8201) on every AOS server. The application load balancer, described in section 2 of this blog, does not include the WCF calls. Therefore all traffic will only be routed to this first AOS instance configured in the cluster, now becoming the SPOF.Solution: create (NLB) cluster with dedicated IP and list of hostnames and IP addresses for AOS. You must then setup the Dynamics AX Client Configuration to point all clients to this NLB.