Loveparade drama

For those of you who do know me a bit, you'll know that I'm a fan of the Love Parade. Every year I'm there. This year was no different in that regards, a friend, my girlfriend and myself have attend this event this years Love Parade as well. As you might have heard, there has been a dramatic incident at the party this year which caused 19 people to die and hunderds of people to get insured. I'm glad to mention that we are fine, but we are terribly sad for the people who are not.

I have no words for what has happened.

Ronald



MVP reawarded

I’d like to share with you that Microsoft has awarded me for the fifth time in a row the MVP award. This award is given by Microsoft to the people who are considered to be community leaders in a specific technology. This year some of my community activities include

- Giving presentations on the Convergence in Frankfurt en Rotterdam to +/- 200 Dynamics CRM customers
- Sharing insight about how to position Dynamics CRM and SharePoint for 50 Microsoft partners
- Keeping up to date a blog with about 12.000 page views each month[1]
- Supporting a student with her final thesis around “CRM in a museum”
- Membership of the Microsoft driven Dynamics CRM Content Advisory Board

I'd also like to use this opportunity to share my greatest respect for two of the MVP's who are leaving the group. I've always looked at these guys as thought leaders. These guys have helped me out so many times and I'm sure they will stay my mentors. Thanks Matt Parks! Thanks Guy Riddle! I'm sure we'll meet again.



Performance test with 100.000 concurrent users

Did you know that Microsoft and Dell performed a performance test on Dynamics CRM which included 100.000 concurrent users? They created a whitepaper about this test. If you're worried about the capabilities of the Dynamics CRM / xRM platform, then this is a must read: Download

Here's the summary of the white paper:

Microsoft® Dynamics CRM 4.0 is designed to help enterprise organizations attain a 360-degree view of customers, achieve reliable user adoption, adapt quickly to business change, and accelerate project delivery and returns—all on a platform that provides enterprise levels of scalability and performance. This white paper focuses on system configuration for the support of high-scale systems in virtual environments.

Microsoft, working with Intel® Corporation and Dell Inc., completed workload test of virtualized Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 on Dell™ PowerEdge™ R910 servers equipped with Intel® Xeon® Processor 7500 Series and solid state drives (SSDs).With 20 virtual machines (VMs) on two Dell PowerEdge R910 servers, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 was able to sustain 100,000 users showing its ability to scale on a hardware platform ideal for large-scale application consolidation projects.

Results Summary
Benchmark testing was performed on a Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 implementation that included Microsoft® Windows Server® 2008 R2 Hyper-V and Microsoft SQL Server® 2008 R2, two Dell PowerEdge R910 servers running Intel® Xeon® Processors 7500 Series-based with storage managed by a Dell PowerVault™ MD1220 with solid state drives.

Large enterprises often deploy multiple parallel CRM instances to meet the diverse needs of different business units or geographies. Microsoft Dynamics CRM meets this need through a multi-tenant architecture which can add independent tenants to a shared hardware and management environment. Microsoft Dynamics CRM’s multi-tenant capabilities were employed to create five organizations running under a single deployment with workload distributed across 20 virtual machines. In this test environment, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 demonstrated the following performance characteristics:

Concurrent Users: 100,000
Average Response Time: .29 seconds
Web Requests: 5.1 M/hr.
Business Transactions: 778,000/hr.

According to the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Scalability Benchmark May 2009 study, performance results with half as many concurrent users were as follows:

Concurrent Users: 50,000
Average Response Time: .12 seconds
Web Requests: 2.4 M/hr.
Business Transactions: 374,000/hr.

This workload demonstrates that five Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 instances can achieve sub-second response times with 100,000 concurrent users executing a heavy workload in a virtual environment.

This white paper details the results of workload testing conducted on Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 running on a Dell PowerEdge R910 server with Intel® X7560 (Nehalem-EX) processors and solid state drives. Included are:

• A description of the CRM implementation and the methods used to obtain the benchmark.

• Details of the hardware configuration and optimization settings used in testing.

• A summary of the key test parameters and results achieved.

These results reflect the scalability and performance of a specific Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 implementation running in a particular test environment powered by Intel® Xeon® Processors 7500 Series-based servers. Each organization is different; factors ranging from industry vertical to geographic span can affect how an enterprise organization uses its CRM system, so results will vary for each implementation. Customers may be able to achieve higher levels of performance and scalability through customization and a finer level of optimization.



Special Epicenter price for my blog readers

The organization of Epicenter have very kindly allocated 10 'concession tickets' for me to offer to people.

One Day €129.00 Now €50.00 Save €80.00

Two Days* €189.00 Now €100.00 Save €90.00

Three Days* €229.00 Now €150.00 Save €80.00

Four Days* €239.00 Now €200.00 Save €39.00

Be the first to book. More details:
http://epicenter.ie/2010_Ronald_Lemmen_Page



Speaking at the Epicenter 2010

If you don't have plans for this week yet, then you should consider coming over to Dublin for the Epicenter 2010. Matt Wittemann and myself will be doing presentations at this event around Dynamics CRM and xRM on Wednesday the 9th of June.

Next to these sessions I'd like to share some of the other highlights of the event:
Tuesday - Chris Horn on the Future of Irish Software with the Governments Innovation Strategy.
Wednesday - AOL Architect Ken Wilson on Web Service Design plus lot's of MVP .NET & Java stuff.
Thursday - Matt Raible's Web Framework smackdown plus HTML 5, Semantic, jQuery UI etc.
Friday - The results of a global cloud survey are revealed, plus cloud and mobile sessions including Windows Phone 7

Have a look at the website and/or the promotional video

Feel free to bring your most difficult questions!



0x81020030: Invalid file name

I'm using the approach as described here to create a folder in SharePoint. For some reason I do get the following error message every now and then.

0x81020030:Invalid file name.
The file name you specified could not be used. It may be the name of an existing file or directory, or you may not have permission to access the file.

Apparently this does not have to do anything with an existing file or directory, or permissions to access the file. What in my case does cause this error, is the fact that the sharepoint listname has a length of larger than 50 characters.

Since this was not mentioned on the web according to my biggest friends Google and Bing, I thought it might help somebody else as well.



CRMAsyncService using 100% CPU v2

A while ago I wrote an article around how to handle the situation that the CRMAsyncService is consuming 99 to 100% of the CPU of the CRM Server. That solution has been written around the scenario that there are basically no workflows running. Obviously, there is the possibility as well that the amount of workflows is causing such behavior.

CRM is tested to be capable of handling thousands of active workflows. This of course does require a minimum set of hardware. If you are having a heavy load on the CRMASyncService due to the amount of workflows in combination with a relatively small server, then you'll need to change default settings of CRM to make sure that your system will remain active.

The default settings for workflow are set to a minimum of 1000 active workflows and maximum 2000 active workflows. This is fine for a system of at least 8GB ram, preferably even more. If you are running a server with for instance 4GB ram, then you should consider lowering these settings. Experience has learned that a setting of 100 for the minimum and 200 for the maximum setting is a good setting for a 4GB server. The server then isn't busy all the time with looking at too many workflows which causes timeouts, but instead only looks at a few and is able to finish these workflows in time.

Here's a small SQL script which you can run on your server to change this setting.


USE MSCRM_CONFIG
UPDATE DeploymentProperties SET IntColumn=100 where ColumnName = 'AsyncItemsInMemoryLow'
UPDATE DeploymentProperties SET IntColumn=200 where ColumnName = 'AsyncItemsInMemoryHigh'