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Author: Eric Vasbinder
IMPORTANT - STANDARDS AND TESTS ARE FOR THE LAN CONNECTION METHOD ONLY!
IMPORTANT - STANDARDS AND TESTS ARE FOR THE LAN CONNECTION METHOD ONLY!
This document has network standards and specific tests for Vista's LAN Connection Method ONLY.
The LAN Connection Method allows for a remotely hosted Vista client to connect directly to the database and app server, rather than through VRL. A client in this deployment model is NOT hosted by Trimble, but the Vista server is hosted by Trimble. In other words, with the LAN method, the customer hosts the client in their own datacenter, on their local workstations, or in their Azure tenant in the same datacenter as where Vista is hosted, but the client connects directly to Vista without VRL.
The LAN Connection Method is described in detail located HERE:
Links to Network Standards for Other Connection Methods
Links to Network Standards for Other Connection Methods
Network standards for other connection methods, either VRL or when hosting the client in the Trimble AVD environment, are located in other FAQ pages:
Network Standards for VRL Cloud Connections and Testing Them
Network Standards for RDP Cloud Connections and Testing Them
Vista LAN Method Network Standards
Vista LAN Method Network Standards
The requirements against which to validate are listed in Figure 1.
CRITICAL NOTE: LATENCY IS THE MOST IMPORTANT REQUIREMENT BY FAR.
The overall impacts of each level of network performance are:
* OPTIMAL: With network latency, packet loss, and Bandwidth at these levels, your Vista performance experience should be near to the same as your on-premise performance.
** GOOD: With network levels in this category, your Vista performance should be Good, but WILL be slower than on-premise for data entry, some report generation, and loading forms. NOTE: To increase form loading speed, please ensure you have Paging turned ON: Enabling Vista Paging.
*** ACCEPTABLE: With network levels in this range, your Vista client performance should be OK for most users, but your heavy data entry personnel and backoffice accounting staff may find the majority of client operations (NOT BATCH JOBS) to be measurably slower than on-premise. These users may that you host the Vista client in your own Azure tenant in the same datacenter region as where Vista is hosted.
**** UNSUPPORTED: At this network level, all operations will be significantly slower than on-premise. At this latency, many users will find the performance impact to be significant. Thus, we strongly recommend either:
Hosting the Vista client in your own AVD servers in your own Azure Tenant, but in the same datacenter region as where Vista is hosted by Trimble.
OR
Switching to VRL or Vista Web if possible.
Why is Vista LAN Method in the Cloud Often Slower than On Premise?
Why is Vista LAN Method in the Cloud Often Slower than On Premise?
When a customer is running Vista on-premise, the time it takes to get data back and forth between the client and the Vista server is quite small: usually less than 5ms, pointing to a server "down the hall". However, when moving the server to the cloud, the physical distance increases significantly, sometimes over a thousand miles. This will slow things down. This is why latencies in anything other than the "Optimal" tier (shown above) will have an experience of slower end user performance as listed.
For more details, including an easy to understand analogy, please see the following Cloud FAQ article (this article mostly applies to the LAN Method in the cloud as well): Are there any times when VRL might be slower than RDP? Anything that stands out? Any workarounds?
REQUIREMENTS FOR NETWORK TESTING
REQUIREMENTS FOR NETWORK TESTING
ALL measurements must occur from the actual daily use customer network; not a 4G hotspot.
You MUST test network performance from the physical network where heavy data entry users ("The 10 key experts") of Vista are located.
For example, if your executive team is located in Philadelphia, but your AP clerks, Payroll clerks, and controller are located in Cincinnati, please ensure your results are for Cincinnati.
EXEMPT TRIMBLE / VIEWPOINT CLOUD TRAFFIC FROM CLOUD FIREWALLS and CLOUD CONTENT SECURITY SOLUTIONS
These tests will NOT be valid if you are using NetSkope, zScaler, or any other cloud access security broker (a.k.a. Cloud Firewall)
In addition, these tools are NOT supported in our cloud due to measureable additional latency that they introduce. See this FAQ article for more details: Fixing Issues with Cloud Content Security Solutions
These tools route all internet traffic through their external Internet cloud, thus causing all traffic to exit from ONE specific point into the Azure cloud. This will increase latency by a significant amount, mask any potential "true" latency issues, and thus give you incorrect latency figures
Please TURN OFF these tools during latency testing and exempt all Trimble / Viewpoint traffic from these tools permanently prior to going live.
Steps to Measure Network Performance Level:
Steps to Measure Network Performance Level:
Latency
Latency
Go to https://www.azurespeed.com and click on “Latency Test” in the left menu-bar. Make sure all regions are checked if possible.
If your company does NOT have data residency concerns, (E.g. U.S. based company who is comfortable with their data residing in Canada or visa versa) then we can evaluate regions in another country if those would result in significantly improved performance.
Please note that hosting your data outside of your country of operation is possible, it does require your full agreement and possibly the signing of a legal addendum to your contract to that effect.
Monitor the results to see which datacenter is listed as the closest to your location, and what the latency is for that region. Take a screenshot of the list of closest datacenters. See below for an example
NOTE: Latency tests can also be performed directly to your VRL reverse proxy server using PSPing, TCPing, and mtr by using the VRL server's DNS name instead of the names shown in the following section.
Packet Loss
Packet Loss
Install PSPing if you are on Windows: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/pstools
If you are on Mac OS X or Linux, install TCPing and MTR using tools like Macports or your local package manager (e.g. apt-get).
Open the Windows command prompt by hitting the Windows-R key combination, then typing "CMD" in to the window that comes up.
NOTE: You may also open the command prompt by clicking on the Cortana search field on the bottom left of the windows task bar.
Then use the following command: >psping -t -4 REGIONTESTDNSNAME:443
Use the following Servers to Test Packet Loss to your preferred Azure Region Datacenter:
CRITICAL NOTE
MICROSOFT HAS ADVISED US THAT WE CANNOT DEPLOY NEW RESOURCES TO EAST US DUE TO POWER AND COMPUTE CONSTRAINTS. WE RECOMMEND DEPLOYING TO EAST US 2 INSTEAD. THIS RESTRICTION WILL BE IN PLACE UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.
Stop the program after about 10 seconds by hitting Control-C
The results should look something like this:
The Packet loss statistic you need is in the second to the last line in the tool output.
NOTE: this tool will also show you the most accurate view of the average latency.
NOTE: Packet loss may be found using other tools than psping. E.g. WinMTR, mtr (mac / linux), Ping Plotter, Open Visual TraceRoute, TCPing, and others. Viewpoint Cloud Operations can help.
(OPTIONAL) The number of network hops can also be an important performance factor. If you can, please perform a traceroute to determine the physical route that packets take through the Internet in order to reach your preferred VRL Cloud datacenter. This usually requires software like WinMTR, mtr, Ping Plotter, or Open Visual TraceRoute. Viewpoint Cloud Operations can help.
Upload and Download
Upload and Download
To test these two areas of network performance, please ensure you are using either the web site for https://www.speedtest.net, or the Speedtest app, from the local workstation(s) of actual end users that will be performing your daily, heavy usage Vista tasks (i.e. "The 10 Key Experts").
Summary
Summary
Latency is the most critical of the items to test above, as with higher latency, performance of Vista using the LAN Connection method will suffer. High packet loss can also result in poor user experience, as the network would need to “restart” requests frequently, resulting in lower performance as well.
If the latency is above 5ms, your performance will be slower than on-premise. As your latency increases to 25ms, it is increasingly likely that the performance in your environment would be inappropriate for the use of the LAN Connection Method. If this is the case, please investigate hiring a networking expert / consultant to review your network for performance problem spots. In addition, utilizing other mechanisms to modernize and democratize your workflows, such as Vista Web for time entry, are highly recommended.
Tags: speed test, speedtest, Azure speed test
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Tuesday, 03 November 2026 at 10:23AM:
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