[Mark Rhodes]

Hey all Dynamics NAV Admins and Dev folks – we are VERY fortunate to have with us Freddy Kristiansen, Technical Evangelist, NAV R&D team, on Monday, Feb 26. He’s sharing NAV on Docker – containers are the new way of installing NAV and running updates – you CANNOT miss.  https://dcinavugportal.cobaltsaas.com/Meetings/Registration/MeetingDetails.aspx?mid=d4b9cff6-2c41-468d-a152-f64552849ed6

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Mark Rhodes
General Manager, NAVUG
Dynamic Communities
Windsor CO
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[Donavan Lane]

Awesome Mark!!  We are very much looking forward to seeing how we can use Docker in Dev and Test environments!  Thanks for scheduling this!

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Donavan Lane
CEO
Innovia Consulting
Onalaska WI
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[Kyle Hardin]

I went to Directions USA and Freddy had several wonderful sessions on NAV 2018 (or whatever they are going to call it), docker, the new development environment – they were all well done sessions.

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Kyle Hardin
NAV Developer
ArcherPoint Inc.
Atlanta GA
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[Anthony Darden]

I’m curious to get community thought on this topic.  We are a VM house (using VMware) and host our systems on Dell PowerEdge Servers using a Kaminario all-flash array for storage.  Do you think Docker is something we should consider knowing the current environment and staff we have?  The impression we got is ‘Yes’, but I’m still unclear to why.  It seemed like a solution for (again) smaller companies with limited in-house resources to manage a NAV environment.

I definitely want to keep an eye on this going forward, but one eye or both?

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Anthony Darden
Director of IT
Protective Industries, Inc.
Buffalo NY
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[Donavan Lane]

Some find it’s  more of a development tool allowing updates to be deployed. 

We find it helps save costs with Azure because the environment for NAV requires a tier structure and when you have a need to have 15 different versions of NAV running, each VM is a cost per month.  Also housing them with a shared OS layer significantly reduces the number of CPU cycles. This could cut our Azure costs by 80%

Here’s a great summary article. What is Docker?

Opensource.com		remove preview
What is Docker? Docker is a tool designed to make it easier to create, deploy, and run applications by using containers. Containers allow a developer to package up an application with all of the parts it needs, such as libraries and other dependencies, and ship it all out as one package. View this on Opensource.com >

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Donavan Lane
CEO
Innovia Consulting
Onalaska WI
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[Anthony Darden]

, thank you for sharing that article – great summary and helpful!?

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Anthony Darden
Director of IT
Protective Industries, Inc.
Buffalo NY
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[Kyle Hardin]

VMWare (or Hyper-V) are both powerful ways to make better and more efficient use of storage and compute resources. The running systems are completely abstracted from the actual hardware they are running on, because you’ve added a layer of abstraction called VMWare. You can move the systems around, give them more or less resources, fail them over during a hardware failure. All good stuff.

Now think about NAV for a moment. At least one SQL server, one NAV Service Tier (NST), and possibly a terminal server for user clients. Let’s say this is your production environment.

How much work is it to set up a Test environment?  Maybe not too bad, if you used ESX templates during the builds of the NAV virtual machines so you can build VM clones without a lot of effort. How much work is it to set up a dev environment on a local system for an in-house developer that has all of your production data? Or to provide an environment for an external developer consultant? How much work is it if you want to put your test environment into Azure?  I’m guessing the answer is a whole lot of work for all of those cases.

Docker – I hate this description because it isn’t exactly accurate – is almost VMWare-lite. It abstracts some of the actual hardware resources for the guest OS, but not all of them, so it is a smaller, lighter, and more-agile layer in between the actual metal and the guest OS running inside of Docker.  Docker also has a very powerful interface with powershell, both outside and inside the guest OS that let you do scripted builds, template cloning, and deployment onto your hardware. And last but not least, docker on my laptop, docker enterprise (on what used to be my vmware ESX server), and docker in AWS or Azure are all the same Docker. A container can move from one to the other fairly simply.  VMware can do some of that, though VMWware Workstation is $400 whereas Docker Community Edition is free. But taking a vm from Workstation to ESX to AWS VMWare Cloud is not as easy as it is with Docker.

Last but not least, Docker has a good publish/subscribe system which allows me to publish a Docker template (called an image) to a public repository, and then you, sitting at your desk in Buffalo, can get a copy of that image and have it running inside your own Docker system in minutes. And all of those actions can be scripted with powershell.

Ask Freddy for his description of Docker versus VMWare during the presentation. He will do a much better version than I have done here.

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Kyle Hardin
NAV Developer
ArcherPoint Inc.
Lawrenceville GA
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