LCS (February 2018 – release 1) release notes
The Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycle Services team is happy to announce the immediate availability of the release notes for Lifecycle Services (LCS) (February 2018, release 1).
Downloadable VHDs available directly through LCS
You can now get downloadable virtual hard disks (VHDs) directly through the LCS Shared Asset Library instead of downloading the VHDs from the Connect site. To get a new VHD, click the Download VHDs tab in the Shared Asset library or the Project Asset library. This functionality is available for both Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations and Dynamics 365 for Retail projects.
Updates to subscription estimator
With this release of LCS, users no longer need to provide purchased license counts in the Excel template. Instead, the estimator will extract those counts from the organization’s purchased licenses as shown in Purchase History. Any new estimates must be created using the new sample Usage Profile template. For older estimates that have not been marked as active, you will need to create a new estimate using the new sample Usage Profile template and then mark it as active. If you have an estimate marked as active but have not requested deployment of a production environment, or if you have requested deployment of the production instance but the deployment has not started, in both of these scenarios you will need to redo the estimate using the new sample Usage Profile template. For production environments already deployed, you do not have to make any changes.
Upgrade your database directly from LCS on development environments
With this release of LCS, you can initiate and complete the data upgrade process on a development environment directly from LCS. This supports the end-to-end process of upgrading to the latest major release of the Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations application.
The overall upgrade process is described in Scenario 3 in the Process for moving to the latest update of Finance and Operations topic. You can also refer to the Upgrade data in development, demo, or sandbox environments topic for additional details.
After you copy the preview release database to your development environment, and you’re ready to upgrade the database, upgrade the database from LCS using the same process of applying updates on an environment.
- Go to the Environment page in LCS.
- Select Maintain > Apply updates.
- In the list of available deployable packages, select the appropriate data upgrade package (Package type = Data upgrade) based on the release that you are upgrading to.
- Select Apply to start the data upgrade.
If you receive an error during the upgrade process, use the provided logs to investigate the issue. You can then resume the process from LCS after you have fixed or worked around the error. During this process, the development virtual machine is available by using Remote Desktop.
