Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 in Azure: Microsoft Offers a Possible Architecture

Microsoft has been briefing partners in recent months on its plan to start readying an approach to hosting Dynamics GP 2013 in Azure, and we now have a first public look at what an Azure-hosted Dynamics GP solution might look like.

Dynamics GP MVP Mariano Gomez reports that he is planning to stand up a GP-in-Azure test system based on a deployment architecture supplied by Microsoft.  This architecture is currently being tested by Microsoft as well and uses the standard Azure cloud computing architecture. Here is a simplified diagram describing the architecture:

Gomez will be building out his own test infrastructure in Azure comprised of the four key elements, as he describes in his blog post:

1. Provisioning a virtual network, which can be optionally integrated to your local network.
2. Provision an Active Directory Domain Controller to manage the virtual network environment. (optional depending on whether you integrate the virtual network to your local network or not)
3. Provisioning the different virtual machines to support the IIS web server, Web Client, and Web Management Console applications; the various services (Session Central, Session Service, Tenant Services, and the GP Web Services) if deploying each service on separate servers; and the session hosts virtual machines to host the Microsoft Dynamics GP runtime client.
4. Provisioning a Microsoft SQL Server 2012 virtual machine and storage to host the various company and system databases and deploy a Reports Server.

This model, as ...