Managing capacity
To help our customers manage and plan their storage costs on an ongoing basis, the Business Central administration center includes the Capacity page. The Capacity page provides an overview of the total database storage usage, with details about the storage used by every environment. The page also displays the currently used and the maximum allowed number of production and sandbox environments available for the customer.
By default, Business Central customers can use up to 80 GB plus an allowance per licensed Essentials or Premium user of database storage capacity. This storage capacity is shared, meaning that the sum of capacity usage across all environments in a tenant must not exceed the limit. If a tenant exceeds this limit, Microsoft restricts administrative actions that create additional environments. Exceeding the storage limit will not interrupt transaction processing within the existing environments.
Some businesses have unique scenarios that may require additional storage. For those organizations that need more space, there's an option to purchase extra database capacity.
Customers can purchase additional database capacity and environments through their reselling partner by using the following add-ons to their existing license:
Dynamics 365 Business Central Database Capacity (1 GB)
Dynamics 365 Business Central Database Capacity (100 GB)
Dynamics 365 Business Central Database Capacity Overage (1 GB)
This lower-priced add-on is only available for the customers who purchased at least one Dynamics 365 Business Central Database Capacity (100 GB) add-on.
Dynamics 365 Business Central Additional Environment Add-on
Number of environments
Business Central administrators can create multiple sandbox and production type environments for various purposes, like:
- Creating more business branches
- Moving into more countries/regions
- Expanding within their current country/region
- Development
- Testing changes
- Learning new product capabilities
Every Business Central customer with Business Central Premium or Essential subscriptions can use one production environment and three sandbox environments, at no extra charge.
Customers can also choose to purchase any number of additional production environments via their CSP partner. Each additionally purchased production environment comes with three additional sandbox environments and increases storage capacity shared by all environments on the tenant by 4 GB.
Production and sandbox environments can be created and used in any country/region where Business Central service is available, also in the country/region where the default Business Central environments are located. Additional environments can be created by customers, administrators, and partners by using the Business Central administration center.
When customer administrators create users in Microsoft 365 Admin Center and assign them Business Central licenses, each user, by default, gets access to all Business Central environments (sandbox and production) under the same single Business Central license, still acting within the scope of their license within each of these environments. Administrators can limit users' access to any particular environment by changing their permissions, or by removing users' access within that environment.
Storage
Storage capacity usage of Business Central is represented by Database on the Capacity page.
By default, Business Central customers can use up to 80 GB plus an allowance per licensed Essentials or Premium user of database storage capacity. This storage capacity is shared, meaning that the sum of capacity usage across all environments in a tenant must not exceed the limit. If a tenant exceeds this limit, Microsoft restricts administrative actions that create additional environments. Exceeding the storage limit will not interrupt transaction processing within the existing environments.
Some businesses have unique scenarios that may require additional storage. For those organizations that need more space, there's an option to purchase extra database capacity.
Note
The Premium and Essential subscription types give each Business Central customer one production environment and three sandbox environment free of extra charge. If the customer requires more production environments, they can buy additional environments through their CSP partner. Each additional production environment comes with three additional sandbox environments and 4 GB additional, tenant-wide database capacity. In addition, starting in 2023 release wave 2, there's a limit on how many companies you can have on a single tenant (see Operational limits).
Administrators can create the additional environments in the Business Central administration center. The environments can be created and used in any country or region where Business Central is available, including the countries or regions where the customer's existing environments are running. The environments quota is applied when you try to create a new environment, or copy an existing environment, in the Business Central administration center.
Apart from the default storage capacity, the customer is entitled to additional storage capacity based on the number of Business Central licenses they own:
| License type | Additional storage (for each license of this type) |
|---|---|
| Premium | 3 GB |
| Essential | 2 GB |
| Device | 1 GB |
Customers can purchase additional database capacity and environments through their reselling partner by using the following add-ons to their existing license:
Dynamics 365 Business Central Database Capacity (1 GB)
Dynamics 365 Business Central Database Capacity (100 GB)
Dynamics 365 Business Central Database Capacity Overage (1 GB)
This lower-priced add-on is only available for the customers who purchased at least one Dynamics 365 Business Central Database Capacity (100 GB) add-on.
Dynamics 365 Business Central Additional Environment Add-on
The Storage capacity, by source section shows how much capacity is available by default, how much extra capacity is added with user licenses, and how much additional capacity was specifically purchased via CSP.
Note
The capacity occupied by the files or Blob data stored in the Business Central database (the content of the Tenant Media and Tenant Media Thumbnails tables) is counted towards the overall database storage capacity of the customer (tenant).
Storage usage by environment
The Storage usage by environment section of the Capacity page provides a tenant-level view of where your organization is using storage capacity. Here you can see how much database storage is used by each environment. For each of your environments, you can also navigate to the Table Information page within Business Central, which let's you see the distribution of data size across tables.
The content of all non-system tables is counted towards the Database usage storage.
Important
When you uninstall extensions, you have a choice of deleting or leaving the extension data in the database. If you decide not to delete the data when uninstalling extensions, this data will be counted in the overall database storage you use.
Exceeding capacity quota
Exceeding the paid database storage limit won't interrupt transaction processing within the existing environments. The existing environments that organically grow and eventually exceed the quota will still be accessible and available for the customers to continue their business operations. You won't be automatically charged for the extra storage occupied by these environments.
However, once the capacity limits are exceeded, the customers won't be able to create new environments or copy their existing environments until the storage used by the existing environments is decreased to fit the quota or additional capacity is purchased. These operations will also be blocked for the customers who have more environments than they're entitled to, according to their subscription and purchased environment add-ons.
Reducing data stored in databases
There are a few things that you can do to reduce the amount of data stored in a database to keep it under its current limit. For more information, see Reducing Data Stored in Databases.
Related information
Working with Administration Tools
The Business Central Administration Center
Managing Environments
Managing Apps
Updating Environments
Managing Tenant Notifications
Introduction to automation APIs