Licensing Advent Calendar – Day 31 – Storage capacity

The last day of 2025. This will also be the last post related to the Dynamics 365 F&O Licensing Advent Calendar. In this post, I will talk about another expected enforcement: storage capacity

Storage capacity

Like Dynamics 365 F&O user and device licenses, the storage entitlements are not new. The number of gigabytes of database and file storage is listed in the Dynamics 365 Licensing guide. Until about 1,5 year ago, there was no visibility in the usage of storage as self-service by organizations. As you already should know, Microsoft is moving from Lifecycle Service (LCS) to Power Platform Admin Center (PPAC) as the administration page for Microsoft Dynamics 365 F&O.

For Dataverse storage, there is already an enforcement. A particular size is entitled, depending on acquired subscriptions. A report is available showing the entitlements and the consumed capacity. If the capacity is almost used, it is indicated with a warning. In case of an overrun, it is shown as an error. You can continue to use your environments, but you will be limited in some administrative actions. E.g., you can’t create new environments, create a copy, or restore an environment. All these actions require at least 1GB of free capacity. You can read more on Microsoft Learn: Dataverse capacity-based storage overview – Power Platform.

There is also a view where you can see the storage consumption per environment and drill down into details to see, e.g., table sizes.

If you are not able to clean up data, you will need to buy additional storage, which is fairly expensive. 1GB of database capacity costs $ 40 per month. A tier 2 pricing model is available in chunks of 1000GB. Then the price is $ 30 per GB/month. In case of a temporary overrun, you can extend the database capacity with 25% three times within a calendar year for a period of 45 days. Extend Dataverse capacity for 45 days – Power Platform

With the unification of the admin centers, the Dynamics 365 F&O database and file storage are made visible on capacity reports in PPAC as well. This has been available for about one and a half years.

When the overview was available, I was expecting a capacity enforcement for Dynamics 365 F&O. I presented about this on a Dutch Dynamics Community event in November 2024 and together with Laze Janev at DynamicsMinds in May 2025. The upcoming enforcement has been confirmed by Microsoft in the meantime.

Over usage

In the past year, I have seen a lot of capacity reports where organizations have an overrun on either Dataverse or the Finance and Operations databases.

The largest overrun I have seen was about 5 TB. For Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations storage, you can also drill down to environments and tables. The most common large tables are related to the database log, batch history, ledger transactions, and inventory transactions. Logs with an age of 8 years are not an exception. In case you are using database logging, ensure you have a process to review the changes and clean up the data. The same is valid for other tables. Microsoft posted an article about cleanup routines: Cleanup routines in Dynamics 365 Finance and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management – Finance & Operations | Dynamics 365

Next to this, you can consider archiving data to reduce the database size: Archive data in Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations apps with Dataverse – Finance & Operations | Dynamics 365

Next to these actions, during assessments, we have found more large tables where no cleanup routine or archival option is provided today. Apart from standard tables, customizations can also play a role. E.g., data is flattened for easy report creation. For this type of customization, you should probably do this type of transformation in a data lake from where you can create reports using, e.g., Power BI.

Part of the consumed capacity is also due to the sandboxes in your environment. When moving to PPAC, there is an option to perform a transaction less copy from a source to a target environment, also reducing the consumed capacity.

How much of the historical data did you migrate from your legacy ERP into Dynamics 365 F&O? Ensure you are aware of the current database usage and see if you can reduce your database size when required. To be compliant in the future, prevent yourself from buying additional database capacity.

Increased entitlements

Since the December 2025 version of the Dynamics 365 Licensing Guide, database and file storage have been increased. Besides, the Dataverse and Finance & Operations storage have been consolidated. In the first screenshot in this post, you see a sudden increase in the allowed capacity. At this moment in time, the F&O consumption is not in this report, but is expected to be there soon. The F&O consumption is visible via the menu options as shown in the second screenshot above.

Before December 2025, the next entitlements were valid.

The new table with included capacity:

You will notice that both the per-tenant and per-user have higher database and file storage entitlements. An example:

Dataverse + F&O database per tenant was 15 + 60 = 75 GB.
Combined database storage is now 90 GB.

Per user license, the available capacity will increase, according to the table above. What I noticed is that the Premium licenses for Finance and Supply Chain Management are attractive now. Let’s compare the differences between the standard and premium licenses. (file storage not in the comparison below)

	Standard	Premium
Price	$ 210	$ 300
Tenant capacity	90 GB	125 GB
Per user	5 GB	10 GB
Minimum purchase quantity	20	10
Additional features	Business Performance Planning	Demand Planning
Electronic invoice transactions/tenant/month	100	200
Invoice capture transactions/tenant/month	100	200
AI Builder Credits/tenant/month	20000	50000
Copilot credits/user/month	–	1000

In case you have an overusage of the database, the premium licenses give you a huge discount on the database capacity. The 5 GB additional storage is worth 5 * $ 40 = $ 200. The price difference between a standard and premium license is $ 300 – $ 210 = $ 90. Only on the database, you save $ 110 per month. Apart from this advantage, you also get Copilot credits, more AI Builder credits, and more transactions for electronic invoicing and invoice captures. Look at the premium licenses, not only for the features, but also for all other advantages.

Actions for 2026

If you are not compliant, first focus on becoming compliant with user licenses. In addition, prepare yourself for the upcoming device and storage enforcement.

As shared in an earlier post about assigning licenses, I will soon share a post with Power Automate flows for license assignment automation. I wish you a happy and healthy 2026!

There is more…

During the Advent period, each day in December, I shared some thoughts and tips related to the Dynamics 365 user license enforcement. I extended the period for my series of blog posts to the last date of the year. If you have questions about this topic, feel free to contact me via LinkedIn, the comments section below, or the contact form on this blog.

Dynamics 365 Licensing Enforcement Advent Calendar

I do hope you liked this post and will add value for you in your daily work as a professional. If you have related questions or feedback, don’t hesitate to use the Comment feature below.


That’s all for now. Till next time!