Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 on Azure: Reflecting on an Early Installation

At the end of last year, as Microsoft was wrapping up its partner briefings regarding its preparations for an approach to hosting Dynamics GP 2013 in Azure, Microsoft Dynamics GP MVP Mariano Gomez offered the first public look at what an Azure-hosted Dynamics GP solution might look like.

At the time, Gomez reported that he was planning to stand up a GP-in-Azure test system based on a deployment architecture supplied by Microsoft. This architecture, which was also being tested by Microsoft, used the standard Azure cloud computing architecture.

Recently, Gomez wrote a series of posts on his experience setting up the Dynamics GP on the Azure environment.

And while he had a few hiccups along the way, Gomez also had some fun trying to get the Dynamics GP 2013 Web Client to run on Azure.

"The bottom line is Windows Azure offers a very compelling deployment case for organizations running their applications (SaaS) and infrastructure (IaaS) in the cloud," Gomez said in a recent blog post.

Gomez said that although the Azure platform features are still in preview mode, those features that do exist work very well.

"I had a few hiccups and I had to drop and recreate some VMs a few times, but I attribute that to the fact that I wasn't too aware of some of the feature settings," he said, adding that part of the problem was that his environment was running in free trial mode.

Additionally, Gomez said he discovered that the VMs (virtual machines) tended to be a bit undersized on Azure.