How to – Migrate Dataverse environment to a different location within the same Datacentre region – Power Platform

When we create an environment in the Power Platform admin center, we get the option of specifying the datacenter region, but not the location within it.

Find the Data Center Region / Location of your Dataverse Environment- https://nishantrana.me/2021/04/27/finding-the-datacenter-region-location-of-the-microsoft-dataverse-environment/

E.g. we have specified Region as the United Arab Emirates.

Now within the UAE region, we had our environment created in the UAE Central location. However as per the data residency guide, UAE North should be the main location, and UAE Central is reserved for in-country disaster recovery.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/global-infrastructure/data-residency/

Considering this we had our other Azure Resources / Subscriptions including Storage Accounts, created in UAE North.

However, while configuring the Export to Data Lake service, we got the below message in the Power Apps maker portal.

The storage account must be in the same region as your Dataverse Environment.

Your environment is located in UAE Central

Please attach a storage account in one of the following location(s): UAE Central

Considering our storage accounts were created in UAE North, we either had the option to create a storage account in UAE Central or to move the Dataverse Environment to UAE North from UAE Central.

Based on the recommendation from Microsoft Fast Track Architect and Azure Architects, we opted for the second option of moving the Dataverse Environment to UAE North from UAE Central.

For this, we raised a Microsoft Support Ticket from the admin portal and scheduled the movement for the non-prod environment first.

The movement took around 30 minutes (around 6 GB storage size), however, it was not reflecting in the Power Apps Maker Portal. The Microsoft team had to perform few steps manually in the background which took around 2 more days for the change to reflect in the portal.

Then we scheduled the same for Production (around 15 GB Storage Size), this time it took around the same 30 minutes and after the confirmation from the Microsoft team after 1 hour or so we were able to see the location updated in the Portal (there were no manual configuration steps needed this time) and were able to configure Export to Data Lake service with the storage account located in UAE North.