Rajeev Pentyala – Microsoft Power Platform

Other day I got a question around ‘Instance Types’ in Dynamics 365. In this article I am going to provide quick notes around ‘Instance Types’.

What is Instance Type:

‘Instance type’ allows you to categorize your Dynamics 365 instance (i.e., Either Production instance or Test instance).

• There are 2 types of ‘Instance Types’ available in D 365
  • Production
  • Sandbox
• Production Instance :
  • An Instance of type ‘Production’ is considered as your LIVE environment which was made available to your end users.
  • You cannot perform some admin actions on your Production instances.
  • For example, you cannot reset the instance and you cannot copy an instance to another Production instance.
  • You cannot set ‘Admin Mode’ on your production instances.
  • If you subscribe CRM 30 days trail, you will get ‘Production’ instance by default. You can change the ‘Instance Type’ to ‘Sandbox’ by using ‘Edit’ option.
• Sandbox Instance:
  • A Sandbox instance is the place to safely develop and test your application changes with low risk.
  • A Sandbox instance type can be your test instance or UAT.
  • As an example, you can Reset (i.e., Becomes Vanilla)/Copy/Delete your sandbox instance.
  • In ‘Sandbox’, its easy to replicate your Production instance by using ‘Copy’ feature.
  • You can set ‘Admin Mode’.

What is an Admin Mode:

• Let’s take a scenario where you want to reset your instance and deploy a fresh build. During this time you don’t want your non-admin users access the instance.
• With ‘Admin Mode’ turned on, only Users with ‘System Admin’ or ‘System Customizers’ can log-in to the system where as regular users would not be allowed to log-in.
• With this mode enabled, all asynchronous operations will be cancelled.  This includes workflows, sending email, Exchange sync, and Yammer.

• You can only place Sandbox instances in administration mode.

Key Points:

• A production instance is must to get a sandbox instance. To add a new ‘Sandbox’ instance you need to purchase it as additional instance. How to add a new Instance
• You cannot reset ‘Production’ instance. Workaround is you have to changing instance type to ‘Sandbox’ and reset then switch to Production.

Refer Link to explore more.

🙂