Understanding Business Central Tenant Capacity and Extra Environments

When your company uses Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, your data grows over time, just like a warehouse that fills up with more boxes as your business expands. 

To help you understand how much “digital space” you are using, Business Central provides two important features in the Admin Center:

1. Tenant Capacity
2. Environments (Production and Sandbox)

Business Central Tenant Capacity 

Think of Tenant Capacity as the storage dashboard for your Business Central system. Just like a warehouse needs enough space to store goods, your Business Central tenant needs enough capacity to store the data your business produces each day.

Scenario

Your company has been using Business Central for a few years. Every day, users create:

• Sales orders
• Purchase documents
• Posted invoices
• Ledger entries
• Attachments such as PDFs and images

All this information takes up space, and as the business grows, so does the storage usage.

Tenant Capacity helps you answer important questions:

• How much storage have we used?
• What is occupying most of the space?
• Are we nearing our limit?
• Should we clean up old data or buy more storage?

What You See on the Tenant Capacity Page

1. Total Storage Available

This is the total storage Microsoft includes with your Business Central subscription. Think of it as knowing the total size of your warehouse.

2. Storage Used

Shows how much of your total capacity is already consumed. This number grows as your business activity increases.

3. Breakdown by Storage Type

You can see exactly what is taking up space, such as:

• Database tables
• Logs
• Attachments and files
• Each environment (Production and Sandbox)

This is like knowing which items, old boxes, new stock, damaged pallets are filling your warehouse.

4. Options to Increase Storage

If you are running out of space, the page also shows how you can purchase more capacity.
This is similar to renting additional warehouse space.

 

Why Tenant Capacity Matters

1. Prevent Performance Issues

Large databases can slow down the system. Monitoring usage helps avoid surprises.

2. Clean Up Unused Data

You can identify and remove:

• Old logs
• Unnecessary attachments
• Outdated archived data
• Historical entries no longer needed
• Cleaning up reduces storage usage and cost.

3. Better Budget Planning

If your company is growing quickly, you’ll know in advance when you may need more capacity.

4. Clear Environment-Level Visibility

Each environment shows its storage usage so you can monitor which areas are consuming the most space.

A Simple Example

Suppose your company has 80 GB of total available capacity.

You check the Tenant Capacity page and see:

• 65 GB used
• 15 GB remaining
• 40 GB from posted documents
• 20 GB from attachments
• 5 GB from sandbox environments

Based on this, you may decide to:

• Archive older posted documents
• Delete unnecessary sandboxes
• Remove large attachments
• Buy additional storage
• Apply data retention policies

Customers can choose additional database and capacity based on their requirements.

It is available as 1 GB, 100 GB or additional environment add-on.

Understanding Extra Environments in Business Central

Just like having separate workspaces in a company main office, training rooms, and testing areas, Business Central provides different types of environments.

Types of Environments

• Production environment: Your live system with real data
• Sandbox environment: A safe testing space where changes don’t affect the live system

 

Default Setup

A Business Central tenant starts with:

• 1 Production environment
• 3 Sandbox environments
• Base storage capacity (80 GB)

This is enough for many businesses initially.

 

When You Need More Environments

As your business grows, you may need:

• More testing areas
• Multiple teams working on different projects
• UAT environments
• Training systems
• Region-specific setups
• Development environments

This is where extra environments become valuable. You can purchase this as an add-on.

 

Buying Additional Production Environments

Microsoft allows you to purchase extra production environments through your CSP partner.
Each extra production environment includes:

• 1 additional Production environment
• 3 Sandbox environments
• 4 GB of extra storage

Example

If you buy 2 additional production environments, you now have:

• 3 Production environments total
• 9 Sandbox environments
• 8 GB additional storage

This is ideal for organizations with multiple regions, departments, or teams.

 

Environments Can Be Created in Any Supported Country

You can create environments in any country where Business Central is available.

This is useful for:

• Multinational companies
• Local tax or regulatory compliance
• Better performance for regional teams

Example:
Your headquarters is in Dubai, but you operate in India, Saudi Arabia, and the UK.
You can create environments in each of those regions.

 

Who Can Create Environments?

Anyone with the right permissions can create them:

• Customers
• Administrators
• Partner consultants

Environments can be created directly from the Business Central Admin Center—no need to contact Microsoft support.

 

Summary:

Your company starts with:

• 1 Production
• 3 Sandboxes
• 80 GB storage

Your operations expand, so you purchase 1 extra production environment. 
Now you have:

• 2 Production environments
• 6 Sandboxes
• 84 GB total storage (shared storage capacity for all the environments increases by 4 GB when you buy extra production environment)

And you can place each environment in any Business Central-supported region.

 

To conclude,

Tenant Capacity tells you how much storage your Business Central system is using, while extra environments give your company flexibility to test, train, and grow without affecting live business data.