Date Published: June 2009.

Author: Claudio Vacalebre.

Soundtrack: For Test, Author: Claudio Vacalebre.

Today Microsoft has announced a new CRM scalability benchmark that "scaled to more than 50.000 concurrent users over a high volume workload - while experiencing subsecond response time".

Knowing that on-premise and hosted CRM 4.0 codebase is exactly the same (no different bits) we can consider this news as a great news for those who are planning to offer hosted CRM

If the bits are the same... what makes CRM 4.0 flying high?...

Here the simple magic recipe:

Combine Intel Xeon 5500 series with Intel Solid State Drives, place it on a Dynamic Data Center, pour Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 over the hardware.

Wait few minutes, then add Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 and bake it appropriately.

Refrigerate until ready to serve.

Anyway, we have to wait few more weeks to look at test details to understand if this benchmark can seamless apply to hosted environments. I' ll provide an update to this blog as soon as I can go through the detailed information, stay tuned!

If you want to perform your own testing you have a great Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Performance toolkit available.

The Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Performance Toolkit was created by the Microsoft CRM product team to formalize performance testing of Microsoft CRM 4.0. The performance toolkit can be used by the Microsoft CRM partners and customers to collect data to support their CRM deployment decisions. This release of the toolkit contains several enhancements we have made to fit the additional capabilities in the Microsoft CRM 4.0 product itself. Some of the enhancements made to the toolkit are:

1. Multi Organization Performance Testing Support

2. Multi Server Deployment Performance Testing Support

3. Outlook Synchronization and Offline Performance Testing Support

4. Data Management Performance Testing Support

5. Workflow Performance Analysis Support

6. Email Matching Performance Testing Support

7. Ease of deployment of the Toolkit through an MSI package with enhanced configuration of the toolkit.

The toolkit facilitates load testing the performance of CRM deployments. By carefully planning the required dataset that the deployment needs to support and the workload requirements, the toolkit can be used to test if the scale requirements of a particular deployment can be met. This mechanism can be used in the deciding on a particular deployment solution and avoid costly downtimes at a later stage.

The Performance toolkit contains various tools listed below that can be used in customizing the CRM installation, populating the necessary semantic data for the required scale and conducting the benchmarking tests against the CRM installation. The tools provided in the Performance toolkit are:

1. ImportCustomization Tool

2. DbPopulator Tool

3. CRM_Perf_Benchmark Tool