Dynamics AX Lifecycle Services will perform our scheduled infrastructure maintenance on Tuesday December 2nd.  LCS will be unavailable during the following window:

December 2nd 10:00 AM - 6:00 PM Pacific   (2 December 18:00 - 3 December 02:00 UTC)

We appreciate your patience as we work to improve the site for you.

The Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycle Services team is happy to announce the immediate availability of the December release of Lifecycle Services.
 

PREVIEW RELEASE

This release includes a reworked experience with several preview features. These include:

NEW FEATURES

• All services have been updated for CU8
• Upgrade analysis can be used for moving from AX 2012 to AX 2012 R3 CU8
• Issue search can be used to find known issues for AX 2012 R3 CU8. Search for "CU8 known issue". (The quotation marks are required)
   
• Cloud-Hosted Environments includes the following updates: 
• The Test environment (previously referred to as the Standard Dev/Test environment) has been updated for AX 2012 R3 CU8. The CU8 version is deployed by default. If you want to deploy the AX 2012 R3 version, click Advanced settings > Supported version during deployment.
• CU8 demo data is included on the SQL Server VM disk for easy import.
• RemoteApp is supported in Test environments when a Remote Desktop Services instance is deployed. You can select the RemoteApp option during deployment when you click Advanced settings > Customize remote desktop services. For more information about RemoteApp, see http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/remoteapp/.
• Azure Basic tier VMs are no longer supported, because they are not compatible with our deployment methods and application needs. Only Standard tier or higher VMs are available for deployment.
  
  Note: CU8 Demo and Retail environments are not yet available, but will be coming soon.

•  System Diagnostics contains 8 new rules for General Ledger and Budgeting that help identify data inconsistencies that often cause issues for Management Reporter integrations:
• MainAccounts that don’t have a corresponding account category assigned
• An invalid Ledger value assigned within a General Journal Entry, Budget Register Entry, or Budget Planning Entry
• A child record with no corresponding header record within a General Journal Account Entry, Budget Register Entry, or Budget Planning Entry
• Any invalid DataAreaID assigned within a Budget Register Entry

LCS customers can re-arm the Windows trial license for their AX demo instance by looking under C:\DemoFiles\StartupScripts\ on the VM and executing “ReArm.cmd” in a Command window with administrator privileges to renew the license for 180 days.

Note:  This will initiate a VM restart.  Please make sure all work is saved and you are ready for a system restart.

To update AX license for AX demo instance VM please download the trial license files from CustomerSource or MSDN and follow the steps outlined in this TechNet article.

Dynamics AX Lifecycle Services will perform our scheduled infrastructure maintenance on Thursday January 15th.  LCS will be unavailable during the following window:

January 15th 10:00 AM - 6:00 PM Pacific   (15 January 18:00 - 16 January 02:00 UTC)

We appreciate your patience as we work to improve the site for you.

The Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycle Services team is happy to announce the immediate availability of the January release of Lifecycle Services.

PREVIEW RELEASE
This release includes a reworked experience with several preview features. These include:

• Methodology tasks can now be ordered
• Beta feature management allows users to see and play with available betas and previews.
   

NEW FEATURES

• Infrastructure estimator now estimates D-series Azure resources and provides warnings and statistics when implementations are too large to size.
• Issue Search now lists Management Reporter 2012 and Connector for Microsoft Dynamics issues.
• Cloud powered support now automatically installs AX 2012 R3 application hotfixes for environments that require them. 
• System Diagnostics has added 24 new rules around SQL and database settings. Details below.
• Priority Boost SQL Server configuration setting has been changed from the default value
• Max Degree of Parallelism not set to 1
• Max server memory not set to an optimal value
• Lightweight pooling is enabled
• Max worker threads has been modified
• Auto Create Statistics option disabled for the Dynamics AX database
• Full recovery model not implemented for Dynamics AX databases
• Auto Update Statistics option disabled for Dynamics AX database
• Auto Close option enabled for the Dynamics AX database
• Auto Shrink option enabled for the Dynamics AX database
• Read Committed Snapshot Isolation (RCSI) database option not enabled for the Dynamics AX database
• Allow Snapshot Isolation is enabled for the Dynamics AX database
• TempDB and Dynamics AX database collations do not match
• Dynamics AX data file located on system drive
• TempDB files not equal in size
• TempDB log file auto growth increment not a fixed size between 100 MB and 500 MB
• TempDB log file too small
• Dynamics AX log file located on system drive
• TempDB data file located on system drive
• Dynamics AX database data file auto growth increment not a fixed size between 100 MB and 500 MB
• Dynamics AX database log file auto growth increment not a fixed size between 100 MB and 500 MB
• Number of TempDB files not optimal
• Dynamics AX database log low on free space
• Page life expectancy less than 1200 seconds

When you login to LCS if you see a blank page like below, please try again in “in-private” browser mode or after clearing the browser cache.

Starting February 19, 2015 Lifecycle Services will only support Internet Explorer 10 or later. Please update your browser before February 19, 2015 to avoid any unexpected access issues.

Dynamics AX Lifecycle Services will perform our scheduled infrastructure maintenance on Thursday February 19th 2015.  LCS will be unavailable during the following window:

February 19th 10:00 AM - 6:00 PM Pacific   (19 February 18:00 - 20 February 02:00 UTC)

We appreciate your patience as we work to improve the site for you.

The Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycle Services team is happy to announce the immediate availability of the February release of Lifecycle Services.

USER INTERFACE TRANSITION

This release includes the full rollout of the reworked experience for managing projects. This is now the primary interface for all users. It is possible to view the previous user interface by clicking the Return to classic mode tile on the dashboard.

NEW FEATURES

• Cloud hosted environments has several new features being introduced;

• Developer topologies - for jumpstarting AX solution development in Azure.

• Service accounts can now be customized

• Virtual Machine names can now be customized

• All topologies now default to D-series virtual machines

• Business process modeler  now allows much better import of library content by dragging and dropping.

• A new Environments section has been added to the dashboard to better manage your deployed AX systems.

• New roles have been added to split out managing environments, and performing operational tasks.

• Environment manager. Members of this role have access to all tools in Lifecycle Services and can manage cloud-hosted environments.

• Operations user. Members of this role have access to the following tools in Lifecycle Services - System diagnostics, Issue search, Cloud-powered support, Updates and can manage Cloud-hosted environments.

• The System Diagnostic tool has had a few minor changes and will now request an update. No functional changes were made in this release.

Get ready for a change!

We’ve replaced some project functionality in Lifecycle Services. On March 23rd, we’ll be removing document tracking and project planning from the site.  

Document Tracking

Document links tracking for projects has been replaced with SharePoint integration.

For all of the projects for which you've used document links, be sure that you make an offline copy of the document list before March 23^rd.
 

Miscellaneous Project Workspace Features

Project plans have been replaced by Project methodology. Project plans, phases, summaries, and advanced user role management will be removed around March 23^rd. For all of your projects, please make an offline copy of any project artifacts before March 23^rd.

If you have any questions please Find Support.

[Update]

Dynamics AX Lifecycle Services scheduled infrastructure maintenance for Saturday March 21, 2015 has been extended.  LCS will be unavailable during the following window:

March 21 08:00 AM - 10:00 PM Pacific   (21 March 15:00 - 22 March 05:00 UTC)

We appreciate your patience as we work to improve the site for you.

Dynamics AX Lifecycle Services will perform our scheduled infrastructure maintenance on Saturday March 21, 2015.  LCS will be unavailable during the following window:

March 21 08:00 AM - 4:00 PM Pacific   (21 March 15:00 - 21 March 23:00 UTC)

We appreciate your patience as we work to improve the site for you.

The Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycle Services team is happy to announce the immediate availability of the March release of Lifecycle Services.

NEW FEATURES

• Several new features have been introduced to Cloud-hosted environments to support customers that want to go live with AX 2012 R3 on Azure with a deployment that achieves the Azure SLA, possesses high-availability characteristics in the core AX tiers (AD, SQL, AOS, CLI, and RDS), and acts predictably in expected deployment scenarios. The new features include:
• Support for Azure Premium Storage
• Support for mix and match A/D/G series virtual machines (VMs)
• Static IP addresses
• G-series VMs are now available
• The High availability topology is available in public preview
• Visual improvements have been made to the Methodology toolset.
• We now ship updates on weekends instead of during business days.
• LCS Solutions have been released in private preview. LCS solutions enable partners to create custom content and solutions for AX 2012 R3. If you are interested in creating a solution, learning more, or joining the private beta, please fill out the form here: http://aka.ms/LCSSolution.
• Business Process Modeler now allows exporting to an excel format that can be imported into Task Recorder. To use this feature, you must download this hotfix to Task Recorder:
• https://fix.lcs.dynamics.com/Issue/Resolved?kb=3003077

PREVIEW FEATURES

• Cloud-powered support provides a public preview that allows users to manage incidents for several customers from a new tile on the homepage.
• Thepreview of the System diagnostics AX Crash and hang analysis tool helps you find known solutions for AOS crashes or hangs based on the information found in AX dump files.

CLOUD HOSTED ENVIRONMENT DETAILS

Azure Premium Storage
Microsoft Dynamics AX is, at its core, a database-driven product. Customers and partners must dedicate high-end hardware for on-premises environments. Premium Storage from Azure offers more predictable database performance on a hardware infrastructure that is on par with what is found in on-premises environments. For production deployments of significant size, we recommend that you use Premium Storage. 

To date, Azure Premium Storage is in public preview in 3 data centers. Premium Storage is available only for the Azure DS-series VMs. DS-series VMs will be available through LCS deployment when a customer's Azure subscription has been opted-in to the Azure Premium Storage Preview, and the customer has selected the High Availability deployment. To get access to the Azure Premium Storage preview, start here:  http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/preview/.

For more information, see http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2014/12/11/introducing-premium-storage-high-performance-storage-for-azure-virtual-machine-workloads/.

General availability of Premium Storage will be announced soon.

Mix and match A/D/G series VMs
For our supported multi-box topologies, each application, data, and AD tier has different processing needs. Previously, all tiers had to be in the same Azure VM SKU family for the deployment to succeed. With this release, we provide isolation that allows a customer or partner to use the VM size that is most appropriate for each task.

Static IP addresses
Previously, Cloud-hosted environments lacked static IP addresses. When VMs were restarted, new IP addresses were assigned, and as a result, DNS settings becoming invalid. Because of this issue, we did not shut down the SQL and RDS tiers when an environment was stopped.

By setting all IP addresses to be static, we ensure that customers no longer have issues with stop/start. Stopping an environment will now shut down all tiers. We do not expect stop/start to be used on High Availability topologies that are actually used in production, but we do anticipate that the feature will be used when customers want to test a High Availability topology running up to their eventual production deployment.

G-series VMs available through LCS deployment
Azure G-series VMs are now available when deploying AX on Azure Cloud-hosted environments.

Dynamics AX Lifecycle Services will perform scheduled maintenance on Saturday April 18, 2015.  LCS will be unavailable during the following window:

April 18 08:00 AM - 4:00 PM Pacific   (18 April 15:00 - 18 April 23:00 UTC)

We appreciate your patience as we work to improve the site for you.

The Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycle Services team is happy to announce the immediate availability of the April release of Lifecycle Services.

NEW FEATURES

• Several new features are available for Cloud-hosted environments:

• Azure Premium Storage is now generally available and supported. For more information, see:http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2015/04/16/azure-premium-storage-now-generally-available-2

• When you deploy high availability environments, you can now customize the SQL Server configuration. For the SQL Server virtual machines (VMs), you can select:

• Disk size

• Disk count

• The SQL Server image source:

• Gallery images (consumption pricing)

• Custom images (bring your own license)

The above customizations apply to both Premium and non-Premium Storage deployments of the High Availability topology. It is strongly recommended that systems used for production have Premium Storage deployed.

• The deployment status of each VM has been updated to clarify what is happening when a deployment is ongoing.

• The Remote Desktop Services tier (for high availability environments) now supports more than 2 instances.

• The VHDs used for deployments are now serviced with the latest patches from Microsoft for the pre-requisite software that is installed on the VHDs.

• When selecting the size of the VMs that you want to deploy, the Size column now filters out Azure VM sku's that are not available for your subscription/region.

• Business process modeler has several updates:

• A new concept, called Views, has been added that allows several different slices of information and tasks to be performed against a library. Views are displayed along the left side of any BPM library.

• A review processes view has been added that allows users to mark the processes that have been reviewed.

• New KPI cards are available to map to this functionality in the project methodology.

• A new feature for linking lines has been added to the author and edit views. This will allow you to create a new line by copying an existing one. Copied lines will always be in sync. For example, if you rename or modify one line in any way, the other linked lines will immediately show the same changes.

Are you wondering how to use the new beta feature we just shipped called Lifecycle services Crash and hang analysis?

This blog will help you get started:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/axsupport/archive/2015/03/23/crash-and-hang-analysis-on-lcs.aspx

Sincerely,

The Lifecycle Services Team

Working towards the aspiration to establish clear project ownership we have introduced some additional validations around project ownership and the tools and services availability. As part of this update if you end up having only limited set of tiles/services on LCS project dashboard please request the user from the organization that owns this project to go to “Organizations and ownership” under "Project Setting" page and click on "Transfer organization ownership".

Post this you will see all the tool and services in project dashboard only if the organization taking ownership has a valid entitlement.

We are currently aware of an issue where uploaded BPM recordings are stuck in the queue. We are actively working towards resolving this issue and getting the services back to full functionality as soon as possible. 

Update: We have resolved the recording processing issue. The service is back online and processing the newly uploaded recordings. However, search functionality will not be available in the newly uploaded frameworks at the moment. We are working on resolving this issue with our indexing services as soon as possible. 

With last month’s update, we put out a preview capability that will provide you with better control around support case management in Cloud Powered Support (CPS). Currently when you go into CPS from a project you will see all the support tickets that is associated with your organization in Microsoft support system. With this new change we give you better control over the support cases you see in a project and the support case tickets are kept contextual to the LCS project. This will also provide you an ability to link and unlink a case from a project and also associate a case with a customer while filing the support ticket through LCS.

 How to enable this beta?

After you login to LCS, go to “Preview Feature Management” tile in LCS and enable “MULTIPLE ACCOUNTS MANAGEMENT IN CLOUD POWERED SUPPORT”

Once you enable this preview you will get a “Manage incidents” tile which lets you manage all the support cases that is associated to your organization

You can use the “Associated Account” drop down to view support cases for a specific associated account.

 You can either create a support ticket from here or link a case to a specific customer project in LCS.

You also change the linked project for a case from the “Change project” button:

In CPS, within a project you will only see cases that are explicitly linked/created from that project. In order to manage support cases created outside of LCS you will need to first go through the “Manage incidents” steps mentioned above and link the case to the project. 

We will be attempting uninterrupted deployment of LCS May release on 5/30. During this time all portals and services will be up and running but certain jobs such as customization analysis or uploading a BPM library will take a litter longer than usual to complete. We are fully equipped and ready for this exercise and do not expect you to experience any downtime or outages. Please bear with us in case this process induces any unplanned outages. 

Thank you for your understanding while we make LCS better for you.