Thursday, November 18, 2010

Microsoft CRM Performance Toolkit: Part 1

Our mantra around the company has recently become "Always Up, Always Fast and Never Fails." So for the last few days I have been asked to help perform some testing around the performance of our Microsoft Dynamics CRM system as we plan for a scaling up users over the next few years.

To begin with you have to understand that my companies existing CRM installation is heavily customized and exceedingly complicated. The way that it is used is not only as a CRM tool, but also almost as a centralized location for information used by the multiple Web Applications. Consequently "Always Up, Always Fast and Never Fails." is even more important for this application. Needless to say I am all for testing the heck out of this thing to make sure that we can indeed do what the business needs us too. After all, I don't really like getting yelled at when the proverbial poop hits the fan.

So since Monday I have been living at the Microsoft Technology Center here in Atlanta working with some folks in order to get our implementation up onto a virtual environment. That part actually wasn't so painful since I have had the experience of setting this thing up in so many different environment in many configurations and for the most part have run into every headache that comes along with that so far.

Where things have become painful is actually using the Microsoft CRM Performance Toolkit. For those that don't know, the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Performance Toolkit is a toolset used to test performance on Dynamics CRM.  The toolkit is a free download available at http://crmperftookit.codeplex.com


Downloading is simple. Getting the thing to work is friggin nightmare. After playing around with the installer, reading the obviously out of date documentation and trying to get it to work, it has gotten to the point where I have downloaded the source code (Yay codeplex!), and I have begun to go through the code line by line. Two days later we've managed to get something resembling working, but its not really working. With a deadline fast approaching tomorrow this is going to prove to be an interesting day.

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