Dynamics Ax 4.0 installation

This article gives advice on the installation of Dynamics Ax 4.0

Requirements
Generally, any machines involved in running Ax 4.0 must be connected to a domain running Active Directory. Running in Workgroup mode is not supported and will not work.

If you are running on a machine which is a member of a domain, but is currently disconnected from that domain, then you will not be able to install Ax 4.0, but it should be possible to run it as the client machine will have cached the previous credentials.

Client
The Ax 4.0 client can be installed on any maching running the following operating systems (summarised list)


 * Windows Vista all versions (SP1)
 * Windows XP Professional (SP2+)
 * Windows XP Tablet PC Edition (XP2+)
 * Windows 2003 Server (including SBS)
 * Windows 2000 Server (SP4+)
 * hm?

AOS
According to the documentation, the AOS machine must be running one of the following:
 * Windows 2003 Server (including SBS)

Hotfix KB913184 should be installed.

However, the following operating systems also support running an Ax 4.0 AOS:
 * Windows XP Professional (SP2+) XP is not supported for a production environment

A recent version of MDAC (Microsoft Data Access Components must also be installed on the AOS machine.

Database server
The database server can run any operating system which is capable of supporting the correct database software.

Ax 4.0 can use make use of the following databases: Oracle is not supported in the initial release but is with SP1 or greater
 * SQL Server 2005 (SP2 is recommended for performance)
 * SQL Server 2000 SP4 and higher
 * Oracle 10G Release 2 Enterprise Edition

A recent version of MDAC (Microsoft Data Access Components must also be installed on the database server.

Remember to install SQL2000 with "case insensitive" (_CI). The installation program does not override the default settings.

Enterprise Portal
The Enterprise Portal should always be installed on a 32-bits Windows Server OS.

It is recommended to place this machine in a DMZ with it's own Domain, if customers are supposed to login. Your Domain should have a one-way trust with the EP-Domain.

The latest version of Sharpoint services is required for the EP to run.

AOS
Follow the setup wizard for the Application Object Server.

By default, the AOS instance will run on port 2712. This is the same as Ax 3.0, so if you have a 3.0 AOS running then the 4.0 AOS will not be able to start and you will see an error message in the Event Viewer similar to the one shown below.

Object Server 01: RPC error: The Dynamics Server could not be started because TCP Port 2712 is already in use.

In this case you should either stop your 3.0 AOS or change the port of either so that they don't conflict.

If the database parameters are not set up correctly in the AOS configuration, or there is a problem with the database permissions for the AOS user, then you may receive an error similar to the following:

Could not start the Dynamics Server$01-Company1 service on Local Computer. Error 100: Cannot create another system semaphore.

This "semaphore error" is a general error indicating that the AOS cannot connect to the database for some reason.

Database server
When creating a new database for Ax 4.0, the following rules must be followed:
 * Database collation must be case-insensitive
 * Database collation must match the Microsoft Windows locale of the computers running instances of Application Object Server (AOS).

Ensure that the user running the AOS service (normally NetworkService) has appropriate permissions to the Ax database. This means that the following roles should be assigned:
 * db_ddladmin
 * db_datareader
 * and db_datawriter.

Setup on a computer which does not belong to any domain
Unforunately setup of AX 4 on the computer outside a domain is prohibited by installer. But there is a trick for doing such thing and Ax 4 works good. This trick is tested under Windows XP SP2, it does not work on Vista.

Here are steps of the trick (borrowed from AxForum):


 * 1) Change the value of there registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\ComputerName\ActiveComputerName to any value which does not match the name of your computer
 * 2) Set value of environment variable named "UserDnsDomain" to any other value
 * 3) Run setup.exe
 * 4) Restore values, changed on the steps 1, 2
 * 5) Go to client and server setup in control panel and change computer name to the real name of your computer

Steps 1-3 can be automated using the batch file (download). The contents of the file downloaded must be placed to the folder when setup.exe lives or the path of setup.exe in the setup.bat should be changed.