Advantages, Disadvantages, and Process to Transition to Enterprise Architecture (EA) with Vista Enterprise Database (VED)
Author: Eric Vasbinder
Applicable ERPs
Vista
The largest customers of our Vista ERP solution often have sophisticated needs, from compliance, to analytics, to BI reporting, trend analysis, and more. To that end, these customers often employ multiple sets of third party analytics and reporting tools, visualizations, Vista dashboards and workcenters, and more. All of this need, combined with the sheer volume of transactional activity inherent in a customer of this size often results in decreased performance for these customers, even when they are running on our Enterprise Architecture (EA) solution (Enterprise Architecture - Vista). These organizations, which are likely to be substantial, publicly traded organizations with hundreds of ERP users and multiple billions of dollars in revenue every year, need an additional bump in environment horsepower and capabilities.
To that end, Trimble has been developing our Vista Enterprise Database (VED) capability. This capability expands on the horizontal scaling of EA by adding in two additional components:
A near real time replicated SQL server for read only queries that synchronizes with the main Vista transactional DB.
This is set up using SQL Always On, replicating in near real time (within one minute) from the main transactional DB
This reporting database is used to drive Reporting, Disaster Recovery (in the same region), Third party read only integrations, etc.
An Azure listener (the -AG availability group device) that serves as a means to intelligently route traffic to each database, as well as providing modest component level HA capabilities.
VED, once implemented in a customer environment, provides a measurable level of offloading for heavy reporting tasks, preserving the performance of the main transactional SQL database.
VED was originally developed to to improve the performance of our Vista transactional database and relieve the pressure of Disaster Recovery, Reporting etc.
Please note that the foundation of any VED implementation is the Enterprise Architecture (EA) environment: any VED installation will be placed ONLY in a new EA environment. To that end, we recommend reviewing Enterprise Architecture if you are not familiar with that deployment model: Enterprise Architecture - Vista
For customers whose overall volume of concurrent activity and/or batch transaction volume exceeds that which our normal Enterprise Architecture provides, we offer an Enterprise Architecture with VED option for the Vista ERP cloud. This deployment model, only available to Vista ESB customers at the Silver tier or higher, consists of the following components:
The "-AG" box: This is a dedicated device that sits in front of the two SQL servers, intelligently routing traffic to each SQL server and containing the ability to failover from one SQL server to another in the event of failure.
The "-SQL1" box: This is the primary SQL server for the Vista environment. This dedicated virtual machine is allocated specifically to house the Vista records and attachments database instance. Critically, this machine in the VED model is dedicated to transactional processing only. Report generation and read only querying is shifted to the -SQL2 box.
The "-SQL2" box: This is a dedicated virtual machine, allocated specifically only to house the Vista records and attachments database instances. Criticall this machine in the VED model is dedicated to reporting, BI, and other read only activities, offloading any transactional processing to the main SQL1 server.
The "-APP" box: This is a dedicated virtual machine, allocated specifically only to house the Vista application server
The "-CN1" box: This is a dedicated virtual machine, allocated specifically to only how's the Crystal Reports engine.
Please note that some environments may have up to three additional Crystal Reports nodes in a cluster ("-CN2", "-CN3", "-CN4"), depending upon the level of Crystal reporting demand present in the environment.
The "D1" box: Providing support for User Profiles.
The "D2" box: The Vista Web (formerly Keystyle or HFF) application and web server
The "-VRL" box: The reverse proxy server that enables Vista Remote Link to provide HTTPS based conductivity for Vista rich clients into the Vista database when hosted in our cloud
The "MS1" or "TS1" box: The Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) or RDP Terminal Services box. For use when end users need lower latency access to the Vista client itself when connecting from connections with substandard latencies above 30-40ms, such as satellite internet (e.g. Starlink).
Please reach out to your Trimble ESB, Support, or Account management teams for a copy of our Architectural Diagram if needed. Please note that this requires a mutual NDA, which most customers have as part of their customer contracts with Trimble.
As you can see, based on the above architectural details, the Enterprise Architecture with VED deployment model enables us to split the processing of database queries from application logic, as well as moving the processing of Crystal reports from the application and database server. In addition, all reporting activity, by being separated from the transactional processing into a separate SQL server can significantly spread the load even further.
This allows us to horizontally scale the operations of Vista, as well as allowing for more clean and efficient allocation of resources during heavy operations.
Enterprise Architecture with VED has a number of caveats and changes that will occur when moving to this new deployment model.
Move Vista to a Completely new Environment
Due to the significant differences in the naming and internal structure of EA environments in general, and VED in particular, using VED requires that Trimble set up a brand new, Enterprise Architecture environment with VED, to which customers can move
New DB server name and IP
Due to the move to a completely new environment, there will be a new server name and static, private IP.
This requires that all third party applications that are pointing to the current Vista DB IP be repointed to the new static IP.
In most cases, the new static pointed location is the Azure listener for the SQL availability group, the "-AG" server.
Test Reports and Third Party Applications
As this process is, in effect, like a miniature transformation, there is a need for a full testing cycle to review custom reports, third party applications, and other tools to ensure they work properly with the new server environment.
Moving to VED requires creating a brand new, EA environment with VED for the customer and then moving the customer's Vista instance to that new environment. This new environment has a larger footprint and associated significantly increased costs for Trimble.
As such, there are certain requirements that must be met in order for a customer to qualify to be upgraded to Enterprise Architecture with VED. First and foremost is that any customer who wishes to move to enterprise architecture MUST purchase an upgrade to the Silver tier or higher of the Enterprise Solution Bundle (ESB) for Vista, known as the Vista Enterprise Infrastructure and Support (VEIS), or VEIS ESB.
The software logic necessary to run VED is only present in Vista and Vista Web version 2026.6 and higher. As such, moving to VED will require those versions of Vista and Vista Web at a minimum.
The project to move to an environment with VED will be a complex and extensive effort, moving the customer from their existing cloud environment to a brand-new EA environment with the VED servers installed. The process itself, since it requires a full move of the entire customer’s Vista and Vista Web ecosystem, repointing of all third-party integrations, etc. is very similar in terms of time and effort for an on-premise to cloud transformation. We anticipate 3-6 months of time at a reasonable estimate.
Due to the complexity of such a move, the customer must not only be on at least the Silver tier of the Vista ESB program but must also purchase an implementation services project to allow for Trimble to assign uniquely skilled, dedicated engineering and project resources who are familiar the process of moving customers from one environment to a completely new one. This will usually be added to the ESB contract as a separate SOW.
Please reach out to your account manager for more details on the estimated pricing of this project.
The following are the high level tasks to move to Enterprise Architecture (EA) with VED:
Customer and Trimble Account Team: Ensure you have purchased the Silver or higher Tier of the ESB.
Trimble: Stand up brand new EA environment with the three VED components (-AG, -SQL1, -SQL2).
Trimble: Coordinate with customer to begin project to move to to this new environment.
Trimble and Customer: Set up weekly migration calls for the prroject to migrate to EA with VED.
Trimble and Customer: Begin testing of end user workflows, reports, etc. as well as third party integrations into the new environment.
Trimble and Customer: Once all critical functions have been tested and approved as working in the new, pre-production environment, schedule time to perform final data copy into new environment.
Trimble: Perform final data copy into new environment. Turn off old servers. Perform final QA checks.
Customer: Perform final QA validation with internal IT / QA staff.
Customer: Hand off new environment to end users.
Customer and Trimble: Coordinate with post-cut over issue tracking and correction, meeting at least 1x per week for two weeks post cut over.
changelog
Tuesday, 16 June 2026 at 04:25PM:
Initial posting