Upgrade from AX 2012 to D365 Finance and Operations. Data upgrade in self-service environments.

Overview

When a successful upgrade test has been completed in a Tier-1 environment with customer data and developed data upgrade scripts you can start the data migration process in a Tier-2 machine. 

It has almost been 2 years since the old process via "backpack" files is no longer available. The only way to upgrade data is by using "Data Migration Toolkit for Dynamics 365" which uses SQL replication process. 

Note: An old name of the "Data Migration Toolkit for Dynamics 365" is "AX2012 Database Upgrade Toolkit for Dynamics365 Version".

The data upgrade process is described in Microsoft standard documentation. There is also a tech-talk session about the migration process. I would like to share my personal experience of the data upgrade in self-service Tier-2 environments below.

Key points before you start

• You should have free disc space in Ax 2012 database SQL server for distribution and snapshot folders. The disc space should be about 2 times more than Ax 2012 business database size.

• "Data Migration Toolkit for Dynamics 365" uses native SQL logins only. I would recommend to create a new SQL server login for this purpose.

• A new SQL login should have DB_Owner privilege in the source Ax 2012 database and access to the master database in the source SQL Server instance.

• Make sure that the replication feature is installed and enabled in the source Ax 2012 SQL Server instance. If the replication components aren't installed, follow the steps in Install SQL Server replication to install them.

• Don’t forget to enable and start SQL Server Agent on the source Ax 2012 database server.

• Download and install .NET Framework version 4.7.1 if it isn't already installed.

• You have to know the external IP address of the SQL Server machine. Use can use this website to help you. You should use IPv4 address field value.

• It is required to enable support for TLS 1.2 in your Ax 2012 SQL Server machine for Azure AD. To find some information on how to do it use this link. 

If you don’t enable TLS 1.2 support in advance, LCS authentication window might not work properly or not appear at all and then you see errors in the logs:

2023-06-25 06:47:27.202 -04:00 [Information] User Login started.

2023-06-25 06:49:38.538 -04:00 [Information] User Login failed.

2023-06-25 06:49:38.541 -04:00 [Error] AADSTS1002016: You are using TLS version 1.0, 1.1 and/or 3DES cipher which are deprecated to improve the security posture of Azure AD. 

Your TenantID is: g9370196-3d9a-9d85-a5e9-3604ec7ffbdd. 

Please refer to https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=2161187 and conduct needed actions to remediate the issue. For further questions, please contact your administrator.

Trace ID: g02f1232-caf4-479c-8c0e-0442059e5e01

Correlation ID: 52f25db8-e61a-4023-9e2a-c487f87e6c5d

Timestamp: 2023-06-25 10:49:37Z 2023-06-25 06:49:38.545 -04:00 

[Error] User login failed / not authorized.

• You need to make sure that TLS 1.2 is enabled by default and that the previous versions are disabled:

Tips to improve the process performance

• Since the "Data Migration Toolkit for Dynamics 365" is based on the SQL Server replication feature it moves data as it is from the source database. If you are short on time for data migration and would like to reduce the time span it is a good idea to perform cleanup operations in the source database.

• It is recommended that you start the replication during off hours when the system resources are at minimum usage (during off-peak time). 

• Also, you can use this article to improve replication performance on the Ax 2012 SQL server.