Failing Dynamics 365 F&O deployments? Last resort workarounds

This post originally appeared on https://dynamicsnotes.com/failing-dynamics-365-fo-deployments-last-resort-workarounds/.

There are times when a deployment fails and even a re-try does not help.  In these cases, a service ticket should be opened to the Microsoft engineers.

However, there are cases when this is not feasible or helpful.  For example:

• • its a tier 1 development environment and you caused the issue, or
  • you cannot wait and need to get it done very fast, or
  • you moved the database but did not run the Retail Re-provisioning tool and the Retail deployment fails now (and you do not care because its not a Retail project).

In these and other cases, it may be OK to just step over the failing step and let the deployment finish (in non-production environments).

The following steps can be used to workaround. Again, this is almost “hack” territory, but sometimes is needed…

1. Find the step number that failed. LCS should tell you. Say for a moment, it’s step 43.
2. Wait till the deployment is in “Failed” state.
3. Login to the VM where this error occurred. This can also be found on LCS portal.
4. Find the current runbook.xml. Its under C:\RunbookOutput, and is going to be the latest changed file.
5. Open it in your favorite XML editor (i.e. Notepad++) and find the step with the number (search for “>43<“)
6. Mark the step “Completed” (from “Failed”).
7. Save the file and resume the deployment from LCS.

Note, sometimes I have found that marking this step is not enough. If that is the case, you can also edit the PowerShell file that the step calls into and essentially comment out all the code. The PowerShell file will be in the service directory under AOSService\DeployablePackages.

Again, this is a hack, but sometimes desperate times call for desperate measures.