The MS CRM E2 and Dynamics Premier Field Engineering team, working in conjunction with Cisco Systems, Inc., recently completed a series of benchmark tests to determine the impact of Cisco’s Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) appliance on the performance of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 across different network profiles:
- 80ms – 0.1% packet loss – 512K / 1.5MB
- 150ms – 0.2% packet loss – 512K / 1.5MB
- 300ms – 0.3% packet loss – 512K / 1.5MB
The testing methodology used for this effort included:
1. Deploying CRM 4.0 in a Windows 2008/SQL 2008 environment
2. Setting up an environment for baseline runs
3. Using the CRM Performance Toolkit to populate the deployment with data for 200 users
4. Executing a 200-concurrent user benchmark to serve as the baseline environment for all subsequent runs
5. Executing the benchmark with different network profiles and settings for the Cisco solutions
Our testing efforts confirm that enabling Cisco’s WAAS technology results in a dramatic improvement in the number of tests performed per second and significant reductions in average response times and average WAN utilization. In summary, the remote CRM clients (simulated) were able to process more business transactions per hour while lowering the response time at the same time.
The following table highlights the efficiencies gained for each tested profile.
Additional details of this testing effort will be released in an upcoming white paper.
Cheers,