Chapter 2: Managing Business Central Environments

The Environments page is the main page of the Business Central Admin Center, and is the page where you will spend most of your time. It is extremely important in the cloud administration process.

This chapter is about managing your Business Central environments, their types, statuses, updates information, and the creation of new environments. In addition, it contains information about how to create a copy of your production environment and test your apps with future releases.

In this chapter, we are going to cover the following main topics: 

• The Environments list
• Creating a production or sandbox environment
• Creating a copy of the existing environment

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to get structured information about your environments, create environments of different types, and rename and delete existing environments.

Understanding the Environments list

In this section, we will have a look at the Environments list; this is the first thing that you will see when you open the Admin Center. As the main window, it contains basic and most important information, such as the environment quantity, their names, current states, and upgrade schedules (if possible).

Figure 2.1 – Environments list

On top of the Environments list, you can see two extra actions, + New and Refresh. + New allows you to create new environments and Refresh is used to update environment information on the list. We will take a closer look at these actions in the next section.

The list has the following columns:

• Name: This consists of the names of your environments. On my Environments list, you can see two environments with the names Production and Sandbox. These are the default names for your first production and sandbox environments. If you open the Admin Center for the first time, you will...

Creating a production or sandbox environment

In this section, you will learn how to create a new environment of both types, Production and Sandbox.

Production

By default, you can only have one production environment per tenant free of charge. By yourself, you could create a production environment only if you delete the existing one (please be very careful if you decide to delete your production environment). You can get more production environments in the following ways:

• Asking your CSP partner to create one more for you
• Asking Microsoft to migrate your environment from other tenants, if for some reason, you decided to merge them

Each additional production environment gives you three more sandboxes and an extra 4 GB of capacity:

1. To create a new production environment, click on + New on the Environments list page:

Figure 2.2 – New environment creation

2. In the Create environment window, type your new environment...

Creating a copy of the existing environment

Sometimes, you need to have a copy of the production environment. The reasons could be very different. Let's look at some of them:

• You might need a sandbox with fresh data.
• You might want to debug your production environment.
• You might want to test some new features.

For all of these cases, you would like to have a production copy, or maybe some other environment copy.

Using this functionality, you can copy not only production environments but also any other environment that you have. You can do this quickly with a few clicks. Even if after your tests, data is crushing in your environment copy, just delete it and create a copy again.

So, let's see what you need to do if you want to copy your environment:

1. Open the Environments list and click on the environment's name that you want to copy.
2. On the environment's card, click on the Copy button:

Figure 2.7 ...

Summary

You now know everything about the Environments list, so you can easily get an overview of your environments. You know how to create a new environment of both types. You can create a copy of any environment for your purposes. And finally, you can rename and delete your existing environment.

Now, you are ready to deep dive into environment management.