Virtualization for AX2009 using Hyper-V

Looking at some more options for setting up hardware environment for AX2009, I came to know about the virtualization option using Windows Server 2008 R2. This is really a good way to consolidate the various server roles (in other words machines) onto a single physical machine. Using the Hyper-V technology, we can now have the AOS, Batch Server, Terminal Server on a single machine, however the DB should still be installed on a separate machine at least for Production environment.

Another important thing to remember about Hyper-V is it needs 64-bit processor (either Intel or AMD) and 64-bit version of Windows Server 2008. A general confusion is that one can also use 32-bit version with Hyper-V and this is not true. You may have 32-bit OS as guest OS on virtual machine running inside Hyper-V.

I am looking at more details about this topic particularly by setting up a virtual environment for AX2009 in test environment and will share my experience with all of you.

Rapid Configuration Tool Label File in Axapta

After I installed the Rapid Configuration Tool with AX2009, the installation went successful and I was able to see a separate RCT module being added in AX client along with other modules. But when I navigated to the module, I only saw label ids (@RCT) for menu items, forms etc. As per the given guidance in ReadMe document, I restarted the AOS but things did not work for me. My machine locale was set to US. Further investigation revealed that axRCTen-us.ald and other relevant files in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Dynamics AX\50\Application\Appl\DynamicsAx1 were missing.

The workaround I did then was to stop the AOS, copy and paste the axRCTen-gb.ald, axRCTen-gb.alc, axRCTen-gb.ali files in the same folder, rename the copied files by replacing 'gb' with 'us', start the AOS, open up AX client and now the proper lable text were there in RCT module.

Recommended Hardware Configuration for MS Dynamics AX2009

While looking for most optimal hardware configuration for a small size AX2009 deployment, I came to know that there is not enough information available either from MS or any of its partners about it. There are a couple of resources like http://www.microsoft.com/dynamics/en/us/using/ax-system-requirements-2009.aspx and benchmark study on partnersource but the resources are not as helpful as there were for AX3.0 or 4.0.

In order to find out these hardware requirements, I had to spend a lot of time on each individual component configuration (DB, AOS, Terminal Server etc) finding out the correct piece of processor, RAM and HDD capacity, Network bandwith etc.