Estimating Hardware Requirements Using The Lifecycle Services Usage Profiler

Lifecycle Services has a nifty feature that allows you to estimate your hardware requirements based on your business process flows and also your expected transactional usage within the system. This is a great way to get the official sizing’s for your Dynamics AX system directly from the source – Microsoft.

This will ensure that you don’t create a system that is either under or over powered.

How To Do It…

1. Start off by opening up your project within Lifecycle Services and clicking on the Usage Profiler tile.
   
2. When the Usage Profiler workspace is displayed, if you have existing Business Processes within your project, click on the Import from BPM tile.
   
3. This will grab all of your existing Business Process models and integrate them in with the usage data.
   
4. After the import is complete then you will see the areas that you will be using within the Business Process column.
   
5. Now click on the Download Excel Template tile and save the Excel workbook that it creates for you.
   
6. When you open up the workbook, click on the Enable Editing button to enable the content.
   
7. Now switch to the Deployment Details and you will see that there are a number of questions for you to answer based on your expected deployment profile.
   
8. All you need to do is click on the dropdown and select the appropriate answer.
   
9. Now just Answer as many of the questions as you can.
   
10. If you imported any Business Process Models, then you will also notice that there are tabs for all of the other functional areas like Sales etc. If you want to update those details with the transaction volumes, then this will help LCS size your hardware appropriately.
    
11. If you really want to get detailed then you can also enter in all of your organizational profiles as well within the Operating Sites tabs.
    
12. After you have updated as much as you can, just save and close the Workbook.
    
13. Now return to Lifecycle Services and click on the Upload Completed Template tile.
    
14. Find the completed spreadsheet and then click on the Open button.
    
15. Lifecycle Services will then take all of your profile data and process for a little bit.
    
16. Now you will see that the Environment Details and the Business Processes columns will be updated with different statuses. If you have questions that have not been completed, then just click on the tile.
    
17. This will allow you to update all of the information that was on the spreadsheet on-line.
    
18. Once you have completed as much as you can within the Usage Profile, just click on the Infrastructure Estimation tile. 

Lifecycle Services will give you a breakdown of all the hardware and configuration profiles so that you can start estimating your hardware and hosting costs.

How easy is that!

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