Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations Environment Tiers, Scaling and Pricing

A summary of environment limitations within the Non-Prod tiers for Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations.

Tier 2 (T2) – Pre-Prod / UAT

T2 environments are allocated for either 3,000 transaction lines per hour or 30 concurrent users with less than 3,000 lines per hour combined.

• Average memory allocation: 4–6 GB
• 1 assigned AOS, 1 Batch server (sometimes 2 batch servers can be allocated with dynamic scaling at low thresholds)
• Core count is not officially provided but generally between 2–4 cores

Tier 1 (T1) – IAAS All-in-One VM

• 8 Cores, 56 GB memory (standard with D13V2 or DS13V2 – HSO standard best practice)
• Threading is significantly higher on T1 compared to T2
• However, T1 environments have product limitations such as environment add-ins like Planning Optimisation, Financial Reporting, and GWS Electronic Reporting connectivity to Dataverse
• The service fabric layer is like-for-like with PROD on the platform layer

File Import Best Practice

For file imports into PROD or T4 environments, the recommendation is to break files down into a maximum of 20,000 lines per file rather than one total file of 700k+. This is the best practice approach.

Indicative Pricing

Environment	Specification	Approx. Monthly Cost
T1 (24/7)	Always on	£680
T1 (Limited)	5 days/week, 11 hours uptime/day	£300
T2 Sandbox Add-on	Standard sandbox	£1,300 (incl. VAT, no EA discount)
T4 Performance Test	Performance testing	~£5,000 (incl. VAT, no EA discount)