Deploy development environment for Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations

When you deploy a new development environment there are 2 options:

• A cloud development environment in your Lifecycle Services (LCS) project
• VM that is running locally

All necessary documentation is available at the Microsoft resources. I would like to tell a few words about my experience with local VMs deployment.

1. You must be an administrator on the instance for developer access. To ensure your own credentials as an administrator on a local VM, run the "Admin user provisioning tool". On the local VM, you can find a link on the desktop. The tool should run as an administrator option (right-click the icon and then click Run as administrator). 

Note: If you see the Admin Provisioning Tool Error: "The value’s length for key ‘password’ exceeds it’s limit of ‘128’" it means that most probably you are using the VM with a virtual hard drive (VHD) that was released for versions 10.0.24 and later. In this case, you should follow the guidelines to ensure the process in order to resolve the issue.

Another possible reason is that your email is related to the inactive Azure Active Directory tenant or you just made a typo. 

2. If there is more than one developer using the local VMs and they are going to be linked in the same DevOps project I would recommend having unique environment names so that developer workspaces have unique names.

For this purpose, you need to go to the Control Panel and rename the VM:

The system will ask for a restart. I would postpone this action until the SQL Server instance will be renamed.

3. The next step is to rename the SQL Server instance. 

Note: My advice is: The SQL server instance should have the same name as the VM.

You need to run SQL Server Management Studio as an administrator option (right-click the icon and then click Run as administrator). Then you need to run the query:

--Run this with the updated names

sp_dropserver 'MININT-F36S5EH'; --Old Name

GO 

sp_addserver 'New VM Name', LOCAL; --New Name

GO

After that, the VM should be restarted. When it is running again, you should be able to connect the SQL Server instance with the new name via SQL  Server Management Studio. After that, you can run Visual Studio in order to establish the connection with your DevOps project and configure your workspace.