Loading all NAV cmdlets in your Powershell profile

If you often need to run both the NAV Development Shell and the NAV Administration Shell and your tired of opening up two windows or tired of loading both modules manually here is a solution.

First of all, you must check to see if you already have a profile, if not you have to create one. Please check out this post to see how it’s done (http://www.howtogeek.com/50236/customizing-your-powershell-profile/)

I copied most of the examples from the above site, but had to change a few things because I got some errors and warnings. Also I added the two Import-Module lines to load the NAV cmdlets. Here is what I ended up with…

Set-Location C:
$Shell = $Host.UI.RawUI
$size = $Shell.WindowSize
$size.width=200
$size.height=60
$Shell.WindowSize = $size
$size = $Shell.BufferSize
$size.width=200
$size.height=2000
$Shell.BufferSize = $size
$Shell.WindowTitle="NAV console"
Import-Module 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft Dynamics NAV\90\Service\NavAdminTool.ps1'
Import-Module 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Dynamics NAV\90\RoleTailored Client\Microsoft.Dynamics.Nav.Model.Tools.psd1'
Clear-Host
Write-Host -ForegroundColor Green "All NAV 2016 cmdlets has been loaded."

It’s easier to copy the code from here.

NAV Multitenant sync

I haven’t worked with multitenant database before, so I had to figure out how to get the database objects updated. It’s not a big deal really, but here is how I did it, using Powershell of course 😀

First I tried to run this command

(You need to run this from the Dynamics NAV 20xx Delelopment Shell)

Import-NAVApplicationObject -Path "\\tsclient\U\Nicolai\300516.fob" -NavServerInstance MyInstance -DatabaseName "My 2016 APP"
 -DatabaseServer mydatabaseserver.database.windows.net -LogPath 'C:\Temp\logfile.txt' -ImportAction Overwrite -SynchronizeSchemaChanges Yes -Username <your_user_name> -Password <your_password>

And I ran into this error message:

Check that:
. The Microsoft Dynamics NAV Server is running
. There is only one tenant mounted on the server instance.
At line:1 char:1
+ Import-NAVApplicationObject -Path "\\tsclient\U\Nicolai\300516.fob" - ...
+ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    + CategoryInfo          : NotSpecified: (:) [Write-Error], WriteErrorException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.WriteErrorException,Import-NAVApplicationObject

Then I tried change the SynchronizeSchemaChanges to No, like this:

Import-NAVApplicationObject -Path "\\tsclient\U\Nicolai\300516.fob" -NavServerInstance MyInstance -DatabaseName "My 2016 APP"
-DatabaseServer mydatabaseserver.database.windows.net -LogPath 'C:\Temp\logfile.txt' -ImportAction Overwrite -SynchronizeSchemaChanges No -Username <your_user_name> -Password <your_password>

And voila, it worked! But we have not synchronized the schema changes yet, take a look at the state of your tenants, either in the NAV Administration GUI or with the cmdlet Get-NAVTenant -ServerInstance myinstance (from NAV Administration Shell).

Notice the state of your tenants. The default instance says might say mounted but other tenants say OperationalWithSyncPending. If you are ready to sync one or more of your tenants you have to run the Sync-NAVTenant cmdlet from your NAV Administration Shell.

Sync-NAVTenant -ServerInstance myNAVInstance -Tenant myTenant -Mode Sync -Force

That should be it. You might need to set mode to ForceSync instead of Sync, this is required when the table changes cause loss of data. Please note that you need to sync the default instance as well, it’s state should also be Operational.

If you run the Get-NAVTenant cmdlet again you will see that the state has changed to Operational.

If you want to sync all your tenants at once you could do something like this:

Get-NAVTenant -ServerInstance myNAVInstance | Sync-NAVTenant -Mode ForceSync -Force

You can add the -Verbose parameter if you want more output, and you can leave out the -Force parameter if you want to confirm every tenant and maybe skip some of them.

Or take a look at Waldo’s blog – http://www.waldo.be/2014/07/17/nav-2013-r2-multi-tenancy-force-full-sync-on-all-tenants/ if you want to control the output you get.

 

 

Automating moving NAV to Azure SQL and multitenancy

In the near future I have to migrate 40-50 single-tenant databases running on an on-premise SQL Server to Azure SQL and multitenancy. I’m new to both multi tenancy and Azure SQL, and Powershell for that matter, but in order to save a lot of time in the future, I decided to create one Powershell script that could do everything for me and save me a lot of hours.

There are many many different ways to achieve this goal, the path I have chosen might not be right for you, but maybe you can use bits of this code and create your own script.

There are some prerequisites

• NAV 2016 service-tier installed (on-premise or Azure/cloud VM)
• NAV instance must be created and set up with certificate thumbprint (because authentication is set to NavUserPassword, if you’re using Windows or UserName this is not needed)
• You have to be able to connect to the server that runs the NAV instance through Powershell (Invoke-Command/Enter-PSSession)
• Azure SQL has to be created
• Allow access from service-tier machine to Azure SQL (Azure SQL firewall rules)
• Install Azure PowerShell (http://aka.ms/webpi-azps from https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/powershell-install-configure/) on the machine where you are running the script
• Add these sites to Trusted sites (if IE is default browser?)
  • https://login.microsoftonline.com
  • https://*.microsoftonline-p.com
  • about:security_powershell.exe
  • about:security_powershell_ise.exe

Here’s what the script does:

• Sets a lot of variables
• Logs in with your  Azure account
• Imports all the needed modules
• Exports all companies from your single-tenant database into .navdata file
• Exports NAV application data from single-tenant database into new database (in this case on an on-premise SQL 2014 server)
• It get all company names from the .navdata file and put them into a variable
• Deletes the [NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE] user from the new application database (you can’t import local windows users og domain users to Azure SQL)
• Connects to SQL server and creates .bacpac file from the new application database
• Copies .bacpac file from \\yourSQLserver\c$\pshtemp to c:\temp or whatever path you have set in the $NAVBackupFilePath variable.
• Copies the .bacpac file to Azure blob storage
• Restores the .bacpac into new database on Azure SQL server
• Connects to your NAV service tier server and configures the specified instance for multitenancy
• Creates and imports NAV encryption key
• Asks user to select which companies should be imported
• For each company selected it will do this:
  • Create a database on Azure SQL
  • Import NAV data into database
  • Mount tenant
  • Create NAV user with permission set SUPER
  • Sets Azure SQL database pricing tier to whatever you prefer (set in variables)

This script is adapted specifically for our current server environment. Most people won’t be able to use this out of the box, but if you’re planning on creating something similar for your environment there might be something useful that might save you some work.

Here’s a simple drawing on the server environment used for testing this script.

The script is run on the administration server. From there it connects to the SQL server, NAV server and Azure SQL server.

Since I’m new to Powershell the script is quite a mess. In this first version there is only one function. I tried to comment most things, I hope that will help a little bit. If I get the time I will create a lot more functions instead of just one very large script, that would make things much easier if you want to adapt this script to other scenarios.

You can download the script here: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/24e6bbb159120ce7763d4f3ca522d5cc or http://www.filedropper.com/movenavtoazuresql

To run the script, you must start Powershell ISE and you have to run as administrator. Set all the needed variables. If you are uncomfortable putting in all your different credentials, you can change all those lines that require credentials, to prompt you for user name and password instead – for example like this

Change the line
$AzureAccount = Add-AzureAccount -Credential $AzureRmCredential
With
$AzureAccount = Add-AzureAccount -Credential (Get-Credential)

When running the script you will get some warnings when loading modules, those warnings are harmless, I just haven’t been able to suppress those, so please just ignore. If you know a solution, please tell me 🙂

You will get asked which companies you want to import. You can of course choose all the companies you like. Please not that the order in which you select the companies matter. The first company you select will get the tenant id ‘default’.

I have tested this with a Cronus database which contains two companies, in the Danish version it’s “CRONUS Danmark” and “CRONUS Danmark A/S”. The dash (/) caused me some trouble, so that will be removed in the database name and tenant id. I don’t know if other languages has other special characters, if that’s the case, you will have to replace those characters as well.

Running the script that will import both CRONUS companies takes just around one hour for me, on a 100/100 Mbit connection, so I expect it will take a lot longer if you have databases that contain a lot of data.

The script contains a few Start-Sleep commands, the longest is set to 300 seconds (5 minutes), after creating each Azure SQL database. This one can probably be lowered if necessary, before I added it I got a lot of errors like “Metadata for table 2000000151 not found”. I have tried lower settings, I can’t remember exactly but I think it was 60 and 120 seconds, that just wasn’t enough.

I have a ton of ideas on how to improve on this the possibilities are endless, but for now this is what I have to offer. Moving all the different parts into functions will probably be my next move, when I get the time.

I hope this will be useful to other people as well, I know it’s gonna save me hours of work in the future. Please let me know if you’re using it, that might motivate me to make more Improvements 😉

/Nicolai