Dynamics CRM planning upgrade and system architecture

CRM 2011 has introduced a new system architecture that changes the way Outlook clients communicate with CRM back-end. CRM is less chatty and requires less services but is important to understand the impact on your old CRM 4 infrastructure when upgrading.

If you have a large number of users using the Outlook client then you may have noticed you have thousands of connections to the Platform servers. With CRM 2011 with the default options the front-end server now hosts these services, which means your front-ends will be hit with web traffic and Outlook client traffic at the same time increasing the load on these servers.

Dynamics CRM 4
The following diagram illustrates CRM 4 synch activity when users opens Outlook and when the CRM client is configured:

Note: The services used when the user opens Outlook are the same, when the Client performs a synchronization every 15min

Dynamics CRM 2011
On CRM 2011 by default the services have been moved to the front-end servers, the following diagram illustrates CRM 2011 synch activity:

Note: The services used when the user opens Outlook are the same, when the Client performs a synchronization every 15min 


Conclusion

• A like-to-like upgrade (front-end, back-end), on environments with 500+ users, depending on server specifications you may expect heavy loads on the front-end servers, due to Outlook Client connections handling more traffic than normal leading to poor performance.

• Ideally you want to place the CRM 2011 Discovery and specially the Organization Service away from the front-end servers.

•  Another interesting design change is the Discovery Service is no longer used when synchronizing the Outlook client, which means you can place the discovery server in a low spec server or even turn it off.

I hope this information was helpful.