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How to convert from Single Tenant to Multi-tenant in Business Central On-Premise

Published on July 16, 2021

With the aim of supporting multiple customers with the same application functionality, the multi-tenant model of Dynamics 365 Business Central helps to store data of multiple enterprises across separate databases while maintaining the application functionality stored centrally in application database. By helping our customers to move to multi-tenant architecture, our Business Central consultants have compiled a step-by-step procedure that ensures for an error-free transition.

Single Tenant to Multi-tenant Transition Process:

Step 1: Open the PowerShell in administrator mode and import the NAV admin tool to enable the NAV commands in PowerShell

Set-ExecutionPolicy unrestricted -Force
Import-Module ‘C:\Program Files\Microsoft Dynamics NAV\71\Service\NavAdminTool.ps1’

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Step 2: Export the NAV application from the source database to the new database by using the command below

Export-NAVApplication -DatabaseServer “DatabaseServer Name” -DatabaseName “DatabaseName” -DestinationDatabaseName “DestinationDatabaseName” 

Step 3: Remove the NAV application from the source database using the command below

Remove-NAVApplication -DatabaseServer “DatabaseServer” –DatabaseName “BusinessDatabaseName” -Force 

Step 4: Based on the above commands, the application database will be created in the SQL server

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Step 5: Stop the server instance in the Business central administration tool

Set-NAVServerInstance Instance Name -Stop 

Step 6: Set the multi-tenant field in the server instance to true

Set-NAVServerConfiguration -ServerInstance InstanceName -Keyname Multi-tenant -KeyValue “True”

The above command automatically converts the single tenant server instance to a multi-tenant server instance.

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Step 7: Set the database name to blank

Set-NAVServerConfiguration -ServerInstance InstanceName -Keyname DatabaseName -KeyValue “”

Step 8: Start the server instance

Set-NAVServerInstance InstanceName -Start

Step 9: Mount the application database to server instance

Mount-NAVApplication -DatabaseServer “DatabaseServer Name” -DatabaseName Application Database -ServerInstance InstanceName

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Step 10: Create the new tenant and mount the business database to the tenant

Mount-NAVTenant -ServerInstance InstanceName -Id TenantName -DatabaseName “DatabaseName” -OverWriteTenantIDInDatabase

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