Are you looking for a cost-effective way to set up a development and testing environment for Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations (D365FO)? If Azure expenses are a concern, deploying a local Virtual Hard Drive (VHD) is a practical alternative. This step-by-step guide will walk you through the process to get started. Why This is ImportantA local VHD setup provides a robust environment for developers to test and build without incurring cloud costs. With sufficient technical planning, you can have a fully functional Dynamics 365 instance running locally. Step 1: Download the VHD Step 2: Set Up the Virtualization Environment Step 3: Configure the Virtual Machine Step 4: Finalize Setup Step 5: Launch D365FO Environment Tips for Maintenance By following these steps, you can set up a robust development environment for D365FO without relying on Azure. We hope you found this article useful, and if you would like to discuss anything, you can reach out to us at transform@cloudfronts.com

Introduction In this blog, we’ll be looking into creating a new environment for D365 Finance and Operations or D365 Commerce. Pre-requisites References Configuration Go to Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycle Services and log in with your account. If you select D365 Commerce, you get the following screen. If you select D365 Finance and Operations, you get another screen where you have to specify whether the project is an actual implementation or just for evaluation after which you get the same screen as below. Once the Project is created, we get the following screen. From here, we click on the hamburger menu at the top and then click on Cloud Hosted Environments. Click on Add to create a new environment. If you get the below pop-up asking to configure an Azure Connector, please refer to my blog – “Configure an Azure Connector in LCS”. Once, you have an Azure Connector configured, you can click on Add again and get the following pop-up. After selecting the Application and Platform version, you’ll get the option to select the environment topology. DEMO – A demo environment includes only Microsoft demo data. You can use a demo environment to explore default features and functionality. DEVTEST – A DevTest environment is for development or build. You can use this environment for development or build. Then we get another pop-up to select the environment topology. After that is selected, we decide the environment name and the size of the VM that is to be used for this environment. You can read more about VM sizes here – VM sizes – Azure Virtual Machines | Microsoft Learn Once we click on Next we get the last pop-up after which the environment gets deployed. Once we click on deploy, it takes about 6-8 hours to deploy the environment after which it’ll be available in the cloud-hosted environments section. If, for some reason, you try to create an environment with the latest platform and application version and that deployment fails, you can try to create an environment one platform/application version below that. Conclusion Thus we saw how to create an environment in LCS for either D365 Finance and Operations. Happy Coding!