We are happy to announce that the following benchmarks will be available, just in time for Convergence 2012. We have
published both summary and detail documents for each benchmark.

• Enterprise Portal benchmark
  
       In January 2012, Microsoft conducted a benchmark of Enterprise Portal for
       Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 to measure its performance and scalability
       characteristics.The benchmark runs a variety of functional scenarios that
       use Enterprise Portal, thereby providing a view of ERP workload
       performance on Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012. This benchmark includes
       creating timesheets, and entering expenses and purchase requisitions. The benchmark
       architecture consisted of two load-balanced Application Object Server
       (AOS) instances that served web users from ten Enterprise Portal servers,
       and three workflow servers to process approvals. The benchmark simulated
       10,000 concurrent users divided among three roles.

The benchmark demonstrated a sustained rate of more than 741,587 lines per hour for
these concurrent scenarios. With this concurrent workload, a 48-core,
256-gigabyte (GB) database server sustained 55-percent CPU utilization; two
12-core, 16-GB AOS servers sustained 57-percent CPU utilization; ten 8–12 core,
16-GB Enterprise Portal servers sustained 47-percent to 85-percent CPU
utilization; and an 8-core, 16-GB Microsoft Windows Server AppFabric cache
server sustained 7-percent CPU utilization and 73-percent memory utilization.

The benchmark results demonstrate the ability of Enterprise Portal to handle
various loads concurrently, without compromising performance and scalability
for critical business processes.

• Hyper-V benchmark
  
       In December 2011, Microsoft conducted a benchmark to measure the
       performance and scalability characteristics of Microsoft
       Dynamics AX 2012 on physical servers, Windows Server 2008 R2
       Hyper-V virtual servers, and a mixture of physical servers and Hyper-V
       virtual servers.

The benchmark results showed 20.68-percent performance degradation in response time
when all servers are virtualized, 13.79-percent degradation when only the AOS and
Enterprise Portal servers are virtualized, and 3.44-percent degradation when
only the Enterprise Portal server is virtualized. Similar performance
degradations in throughput were seen in the virtualized servers.

• High volume inventory benchmark for retail environments
  
       Microsoft Corporation conducted a benchmark to simulate an inventory
       workload with more than 4.96 million transaction lines. The goal of the
       benchmark was to simulate three types of core inventory transaction and
       demonstrate that Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 can effectively handle very
       high transactional volumes. The inventory transactions simulated the
       import of point of sale (POS) transactions for a large retail chain into
       Microsoft Dynamics AX.
  
       The benchmark results demonstrate that Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 can
       successfully process more than 55 million transaction lines aggregated to
       3.68 million inventory adjustment journal lines. The benchmark also
       creates and posts more than 1 million transfer order lines and more than
       90 thousand item arrival lines.