Virtualization basics: Using Hyper-V to turbocharge your Microsoft Dynamics CRM environment

Virtualization in Dynamics environments comes in handy, sometimes in unexpected places.

As noted in a previous article on Hyper-V and Dynamics AX, Microsoft's virtualization engine, Hyper-V, enables a diverse array of Dynamics-based solutions to be spun up in virtual machines whenever additional dedicated "machines" are needed, and spin them back down again as the load lightens again.

Of course, a company's hardware can only perform as well as its sum total of CPU cores, bandwidth, RAM and disk space will allow. But increasingly these days, the choke point isn't always hardware, it's having an efficient and optimized software architecture that enables a company to get the most out of their existing hardware.

And in that sense, Hyper-V really comes in handy for Dynamics CRM, especially for solutions that need to scale. Virtualization can also prove particularly valuable when Dynamics CRM is leverages its XRM framework, which can allow for a nearly limitless range of new business management solutions.

Henry McCallum, a Dynamics CRM specialist based in New Jersey says Hyper-V has been a tremendous asset for some of his CRM clients. For instance, he says, he's working with a company that contracts with 65 different restaurant chains, representing some 600 restaurants, for a restaurant management and accounting system that was written on top of Dynamics CRM.

"Each night at 3 a.m., across the three different time zones in the [contiguous] U.S., they run their end of night reports - that's 600 restaurants hitting a box," McCallum says. "A single SQL server is not going to handle all that. So how do we easily deploy an additional resource for this? Where it comes in handy ...