I have installed AX 2012 R2 CU7 on my local test environment. Now I want to to upload contoso demo data. I want to know that is there any other separate contoso demo data for CU7, or I can use previous demo data to it. Read the forum post on the Microsoft Dynamics Community. Dec 16, 2012. Does anyone know when the AX 2012 R2 contoso dataset will be available? Here is the link, you can also go through partnersource and search Microsoft Dynamics AX R2 on the search bar, and once you find the download page, scroll down to. Just look for 'product demo information', it will be there!

Recently, Microsoft released an updated Demonstration VM for Dynamics AX 2012 R3 CU9. You can find it on PartnerSource, and on CustomerSource. For the last VM (CU8), I converted both the Virtual Hard Disk files (VHDs) and Virtual Machine Generation to the latest version supported by Hyper-V. I also made some other tweaks which might help with performance. Doing it again now for the CU9 VM, I thought I’d write down the steps. I’ve put them here for everyone to read, but this is a really long post, and gets quite technical (in a non-AX way) in places. If this doesn’t sound like something you want to do, I’d stop reading now.

It might be that I’m the only person who finds this interesting or useful. If that’s the case, at least I’ve got it written down for next time!

The download for the Demo VM is spread over 38 files (each 1GB in size), so go ahead and download those, and come back when you’re finished. The unpacked files The VHDs are the ‘virtual hard disk’ files used by the VM. They are the VM’s C: and E: drives. C: contains Windows and the applications. E: contains the SQL database files. Bamboo Opm Download.

At this point, you can delete the file you downloaded called ‘AX2012R3CU9DemoVMA.exe’. You’ll not need it again.

You can also delete all of the files with the word ‘part’ in the name. Or, if you think you’ll need them again (maybe you’ll kill this instance of the VM one day, and want to start again), I normally copy them off to an external drive. Either way, we don’t need them now.

Before we boot it up, we’re going to convert the VHD files to the VHDX format. After we’ve booted it up (and made an important change within the VM) we’re going to convert the VM to Generation 2.

If you’re hoping to squeeze better performance from your VM because of this, there is a crumb of hope for you. The VHDX includes support for something called ‘4K logical sectors’. This is something that is only in the latest releases of Windows, and offers the potential for a performance increase. I’m going to use a command line tool to convert the VHDs, and to make it easier, I’m going to move the whole of the AX2012R3A folder to the root of a drive, in this case my C: drive.

PowerShell from the Start Menu The command I will use is: Convert-VHD -Path 'C: AX2012R3A Virtual Hard Disks AX2012R3A_OS.vhd' -DestinationPath 'C: AX2012R3A Virtual Hard Disks AX2012R3A_OS.vhdx' If you did not put your ‘AX2012R3A’ folder into the root of the C: drive, you’ll need to modify this. This step will require around 115GB free for the new VHDX files that get created. I have room for them on my C: drive, so I created them in the same place as my VHD files. If you don’t have room, modify the DestinationPath to create them on a different drive. Put the command into the PowerShell window (hint – Paste is available by clicking the blue PowerShell icon at the top left of the window) and hit Enter. Converting the VHD There is another I will run, to set the sectors on the disk to the magical 4K size.