Server Roles in Dynamics CRM 2011

One of the questions which always confused me about CRM was about how to scale a CRM installation. So I decided to put my reading hat on and here’s what I figured out

Dynamics CRM divides the installations into 3 Server Role Groups. These Role Groups are further divided into Server Roles. When you are deploying a Dynamics CRM installation you can decide to install various roles on different machines or group of machines to ensure that you meet your scalability requirements.

1) Front End Server Role Group :-

This is the group of server roles which renders the CRM UI and enables various external applications to connect to CRM using CRM SDK or web services. This roles in this group are :

a) Discovery Web Service :- Contains all the components required to host and run the Discovery Web Service. This is a Deployment scope web service which serves the whole deployment i.e. if you have N organizations in the CRM you will still have a single instance of the Discovery Service running.

b) Organization Web Service :- Contains all the components required to host and run Organization Web Service. This is also a deployment scope web service. So as you create more and more organizations and more and more applications consuming this web service you might want to scale this role.

c) Web Application Server :- Contains all the components required to render CRM data to the end users. This is also a deployment scope role. As the number of users on CRM increase you want to scale this role.

d) Help Server :- Contains all the components required to make CRM Help to the end users. This is a deployment scope role

2) Back End Server Role Group :-

This is a group of server roles which are not exposed on internet or to the end users. These roles are contacted by the Application roles to delegate the backend processing like workflows, custom plug ins. The roles in this group are :

a) Asynchronous Service :- Processes the async events like workflows, plugins, data import jobs etc. This is a deployment scope role. As you have more and more async events you want to scale this role.

b) Sandbox Service :- Processes the async sandboxed plug in events. This provides isolation to the plug in code. This is a deployment scope role. As the number of sandboxes plug in events increase in your deployment you want to scale this role.

3) Deployment Administration Role :-

This includes the server roles for components that are used to manage the CRM deployment. The server roles in this group are

a) Deployment Web Service :- Allows to manage the deployment. You can scale this out as you have more and more organizations in your deployment. This is a deployment scope service.

b) Deployment Tools :- Consist of Deployment MMC and Windows Powershell cmdlets. You can install these tools on your Admin boxes. This is a deployment scope service.

4) SQL Server :- This is not really a role but you need a SQL Server cluster which you point to for storing the deployment configuration and organization data.

Same information is demonstrated visually

Hope this helps in understanding the components with more clarity and plan your deployment such that you can scale easily.

NJoi!!!

¬Abhishek