With the Release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 several editions of the product were offered such as :

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Workgroup : This edition is limited to five, or fewer, users. It can be installed on Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition, any of the supported Windows Server 2003 editions, or Windows Server 2008

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Professional : This edition has no user limit and is limited to a single organization, but Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Professional can be installed on more than one computer in the same deployment.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Enterprise : There is no user limit for this edition. Additional features include support for multiple organizations, multiple server instances, and role-based service installation. Role-based services let you increase performance by installing component services on different computers.

This three versions gave us, new insights and new ways of implementing CRM Dynamics 4.0. On this post i am going to cover a example of implementing the enterprise edition.

As described above the Enterprise edition of CRM Dynamics 4.0 offered us server roles, this roles are :

• Application Server Role. This server role provides the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Web user interface and services.
• Platform Server Role. This lets you deploy the asynchronous services, such as the Workflow and Bulk E-mail services, to a separate computer.  

With these we can now offer to a big corporation, flexibility and scalability on our CRM Dynamics 4.0 Infrustructure design. Below follows a example of a implementation example of those roles which i made following those rules :

As we can see on the picture (fullsize image) i have applied :

·         Two Servers with : CRM Dynamics 4.0 Application Role – These ones with Network Load Balancer (NLB) to improve performance and to maintain service operational in a case of maintenance or a server crash.

·         One Server with : CRM Dynamics 4.0 Plataform Role – with the asynchronous services such as the Workflow and Bulk E-mail services. On this model all Workflow services will be handled on the CRM Platform Server improving performance. This feature also releases processor and memory from the Application Servers making either the Application or Plataform Servers more usable on their own resources.

·         Two Servers with SQL Server 2005 Enterprise – This ones acting as failover Cluster, hosting the CRM Databases. This improving the uptime of the service and performance also.

·         One Server with SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services – To run the Dynamics Reports.

·         One Server with CRM E-mail Router – Connecting to Exchange Server 2007.

To sum up this kind of design is a perfect match for a Enterprise Corporation, who wishes a CRM solution offering them, quick response time with excellent performance and also service uptime with redundancy ( NLB and failover clusters ), making CRM Dynamics 4.0 a perfect solution and choice in the CRM world.

I will cover the process of the installation and implementation of a CRM Dynamics Professional Edition in a next post.

Best Regards,

Paulo J. Mendes