Microsoft Improves Dynamics AX on Azure with New Resource Management, More Premium Storage

As Microsoft Dynamics AX continues to embrace Azure for its platform, infrastructure, and services, updates continue to improve the offering. Two updates this week serve as examples - one for scripting and one for improving enterprise grade performance.

First, Microsoft released a new set of sample PowerShell scripts that help customers more efficiently manage their AX computing resources in development, demo, and test topologies. The scripts leverage Azure Automation through Runbook capabilities. The scripts do things like starting or shutting down all VMs in an Azure subscription and deallocating their cloud services, starting or shutting down specific VMs or all VMs in a topology. Check out the full explanation on the LCS blog.

"If you have Dynamics AX deployments through LCS please give these samples a try and provide feedback to us," writes the author. He adds that these scripts assume the AX deployment was done through LCS, and that "[m]oving forward we will be integrating the capabilities exposed through these runbooks directly into LCS Cloud Hosted Environments."

And for anyone running or considering running AX on Azure in production, the news that Azure Premium Storage is expanding to four more regions comes as good news. The following regions have a target release date in Q4 2015.

• Central US
• East US
• North Europe
• East Asia

The general availability of Azure Premium Storage in April 2015 meant ...