What is a Dedicated Environment?
A dedicated environment is a server, or group of servers (physical or virtual) that are dedicated to your organization. xRM.com hosts the hosted infrastructure that form the dedicated environment. Unlike in a shared environment, no other organizations share the resources. They are reserved for your organization’s use only. In a dedicated environment, you may also have administrative privileges over the server, which means you are in control of how the server is being utilized. For example, you can install additional software provided that you have the appropriate licensing rights to that software (and installation of that software does not interfere with other software on that machine), and you can make your own code modifications to the installed software. You are able to perform actions that you typically would not be able to do in a shared environment (install custom plug ins or other software that extends the functionality of services you subscribe to). You can even host your website on the same dedicated environment.
Dedicated environments come in two forms: physical and virtual.
You pay a server one-time set–up fee to provision the dedicated server, have security principles applied to your hosted infrastructure, have backup software installed and configured, and any software for which you subscribe to from xRM installed/configured/maintained. xRM maintains the hardware infrastructure used to provide these services to you.
In a physical configuration, the entire server/hardware is dedicated to your company. You have control over all resources of that machine.
In a virtualized configuration, you rent and control a fixed portion, or partition, of a server. This fixed partition acts as a separate–virtualized–server, and each virtualized server utilizes a set fraction of the entire server’s resources. In a sense, the server’s CPU, memory, storage space, and bandwidth are subdivided into several smaller, distinct servers. A virtual configuration is good for companies that do not need the full capacity of a server, but still need or wish to have a dedicated environment. When we leverage virtualization, we use Microsoft Hyper-V (Windows 2008 R2). A virtualized configuration is best if you want a great deal of control over the server but will only require a limited amount of resources. For example, a virtualized configuration can handle approximately 15 Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 users or a smaller number of Microsoft Dynamics CRM users and a low-volume website. If you have more than fifteen Microsoft Dynamics CRM users, or you are operating resource intensive activities on your server, we recommend that you choose a physical configuration.
At any time, you have the option of moving from a virtualized configuration to a physical configuration.
Further Reading
What is a Dedicated Environment?
Why Go Dedicated?
Benefits of a Dedicated Environment
Cost of a Dedicated Environment