Edge scale units to run distributed workloads at your facility

Important

This content is archived and is not being updated. For the latest documentation, go to What's new or changed in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. For the latest release plans, go to Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform release plans.

Enabled for Public preview General availability
Users by admins, makers, or analysts Apr 23, 2021 Nov 1, 2021

Business value

By enabling you to run vertical functionality workloads at your facility, edge scale units increase the resilience of supply chain business processes. You can run the same workloads that you run in your vertical cloud on the vertical edge. Microsoft provides out-of-the-box workloads for scale units that target processes in warehouse and manufacturing execution.

Feature details

Edge scale units represent the vertical edge in the distributed hybrid topology for supply chain management. They run on-premises, on hardware located at your own facilities, and thereby help to increase the resilience for critical operations in your supply chain. Even if an edge scale unit is temporarily disconnected from the internet, it will continue to run its configured workloads locally. Edge scale units also allow direct integration with other local systems without connecting through the cloud.

Scale units, whether in the cloud or on the edge, always run under the umbrella of your supply chain hub in the cloud and can run the same vertical workload functionality. You can therefore install any of the standard workloads for manufacturing or warehouse execution that Microsoft delivers, and can also run custom workloads.

Edge scale unit, cloud hub, and cloud scale unit with various Azure options.

With 2021 release wave 2, organizations gain the ability to deploy edge scale units using either custom-selected hardware or recommended Azure Stack appliances located at their facility. You can choose to manage your supply chain management workloads yourself or with a partner. Options include:

  • Custom hardware layouts, which give your organization complete control over your edge unit hardware. Your own IT department selects and maintains the hardware exactly as required by your organization. The only restriction is that your solution must fulfil the hardware requirements for on-premises deployments.
  • Azure Stack appliance, which provides an integrated hardware and software solution built by trusted hardware partners and delivered ready to use, straight to your datacenter.

See also

Deploy edge scale units on custom hardware using LBD (docs)