Virtualization basics: What Hyper-V can do for Microsoft Dynamics AX solution performance and management

With the power of today's enterprise servers, Microsoft Dynamics AX customers are increasingly discovering that allocation of computing resources can change with the click of a mouse. Some days your group might run its work on a few machines, other days expand to 15, other days 30 or more. And though the "machines" that can support such flexibility are virtualized servers, the improved performance and other benefits are as real as the clock on the wall.

Microsoft's virtualization engine, Hyper-V, has been making a comeback in recent years. Compared to their chief rival VMWare, which had defined and dominated the hypervisor marketplace since the turn of the millennium, Hyper-V is a dark horse to many enterprise users, having only been introduced with Windows Server 2008. So in this article and an occasional series of follow ups, we'll be talking to Dynamics ERP experts who use Hyper-V to boost performance and improve the deployment of solutions. We'll also be exploring some of the when's and why's of installing and running Hyper-V in a Dynamics environment.

Dynamics AX wearing a hypervisor

Joris de Gruyter, a Microsoft MVP and the AX Technical Services Manager for Naperville, Ill.-based Sikitch LLP, says Hyper-V is crucial to his group's work.

"We are heavy Hyper-V users," he says. "We have to support a lot of different versions of AX. And sometimes it's just the matter of one hot fix that's different. But still we need an environment to develop in that's specific to one client. So as ...