Very scalable, argues the Dynamics CRM team, as in more than 100,000 users simultaneously. And it says it now has the tests to back up its claim. The claim takes on increasing significance as Microsoft seeks to market Dynamics CRM to ever-larger organizations.

The tests, conducted with two pre-release Dell PowerEdge R910 servers equipped with Intel Xeon Processor 7500-series - more commonly referred to as Nehalem-EX processors, netted the following results for the Dynamics CRM team.

• It accommodated more than 100,000 users concurrently over several organizations. "This is the largest real-world business application workload that we've seen on a Microsoft Windows Server Hyper-V system and it proves the scalability of Microsoft Dynamics CRM in private cloud deployments," said Givens on the Dynamics CRM Team Blog.
• According to Givens, they were also able to handle all that usage on just two servers. "Using virtualization we were also able to consolidate twenty servers down to just two, which means that customers or partners that deploy Microsoft Dynamics CRM using this configuration can reduce the power consumption, required rack space and management overhead all while maintaining a high level of performance with the CRM system."

This latest testing is an update of a similar test carried out last year. Stated Givens: "To run the tests we reused the workloads from our 50,000 user benchmark in 2009. We partitioned the workload across five environments, each with four virtual servers."

Givens provides specific guidance for replicating such large usage, noting that data storage capacity is a major challenge. He concludes: "To get the full benefits of virtualization administrators will need to learn a few new tricks, but overall, enterprises deploying Microsoft Dynamics CRM for multiple departments or using the xRM framework to deliver multiple applications using a private cloud approach can be confident the scale, economics and performance of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 when using Hyper-V."