Visual in Azure

Just wonder if anyone out there has considered or tried to deploy Visual in Azure. We are looking at setting up a POC using SQL and virtual desktops in Azure. Will be going with Visual 10 for the POC. We are on 9.0.8 SP4 currently, starting UAT for Visual 10 now for upgrade early Q2. Deployed in Citrix currently. Looking to get away from Citrix (and off overpriced hardware leases, datacenter virtual machines, and data backups).

If anyone has tried anything like this, I'm very interested in knowing what your experiences were? Any gotcha's? How was performance?

Thanks,

Todd

VISUAL Shop Floor -20200804 1501-1.mp4

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Comments

unknown

We're actually starting our POC right now. We're sticking with 9.0.8 for the first POC round then transitioning to 10 later this year. We're in an RDP environment, but will be testing both RDP and client/server-based setups. Keep us posted on your experience and we'll do the same.

I have been thinking of testing the same thing. It will be interesting to see how it goes and now I want to put Version 10 out there and use it for a combination Azure/V10 test. We just upgraded to v9.0.8SP3 and are using RDS. Our Nutanix Cluster cost us almost $100k, so Azure could be a big savings if it has the performance we need.

unknown

We have our Citrix servers on Nutanix.... $$$. One of the bigger reason for looking for other solutions. On the surface it looks promising and better value to go with Azure. We may be looking to just push the application rather than the whole desktop.

We have been using RemoteApp to just push the application since version 7. It works very well.

Even with the full desktop available to users, 99% of them prefer the RemoteApp experience.

unknown

Todd: Thanks for reaching out to the community. We have some experience in this area and would be able to offer some assistance if you’re interested. Azure would be able to host your Visual application server(s). We would want to have a discussion with you if you’re looking to run Azure SQL as a service. If so, there would be some additional caveats when it comes to the application access and your backups/restore policies. On your Citrix environment request, recommendation would be to support Remote Desktop Services as a published application, so you don’t have the additional Citrix license cost. This could be support via your Azure Virtual Desktops. If interested, please let us know and we can get a discovery call scheduled. Thanks.

unknown

We are actively doing a POC of this for the same reasons. Using a full SQL server (not Azure SQL service) with multi-user WVDs. I have found a few tweaks I'm working through to accommodate Visual's latency from server to client. Two adjustments I've yet to make are Proximity settings along with Accelerated networking. I'm doing time comparisons as I make adjustments. I hope to complete this by week's end but it looks promising.....or am I just optimistic?!!

unknown

We have decided on full SQL server as well. We make use of DB mail along with custom trigger and agent jobs to send report and notifications from Visual. That's not possible with the service to the best of my knowledge. I will keep in mind the proximity and accelerated networking as something to check.

In reference to DB Mail:

If this helps at all, we used to have a trigger on the tasks table for ECNs and Purchase Reqs and found that it worked better to run a scheduled Powershell script every 15 min with task scheduler. It looks for all the new task over the last 15 min and sends emails out for them.

Anyone who would like to use the code can get it from my GIT Repository

GitHub - skills-inc/Visual-ERP-Scripts: Scripts to use with Infor Visual ERP

This is what it looks like when you get the email.

unknown

Are you planning on deploying to the user as remote VM's or as a vApp? Any hiccups you have come across?

Thanks,

Steve

unknown

We are just deploying the app. First hiccup is build your DB and WVM on the same subnet to start with... Moving things around in Azure is not simple and routing between subnets has some lag. Not as bad as Visual over the WAN.

We have a database up, Visual 10, running on SQL platform as a service and a client that runs. No end users have been deployed to. Its just be me and our O365 admin. We will probably rebuilt the environment. Still need to work on a few things like INI files, printing, email interaction, exporting data, dbmail (triggers and agent jobs)

I'm extremely optimistic that this will work out well. And in the long run we will save money over Citrix licenses, Nutanix lease to host the Citrix environment, and the cloud environment our current SQL server and file shares for Visual are hosted in.

Thanks,

Todd

unknown

After adding a Proximity Placement Group and enabling Accelerated networking for both the SQL server & WVD, latency tests drastically improved from 574 to 44! I'm using latte for the latency tests.

Additionally, I'm doing some very basic time tests within the Visual app: login, Open order entry, pull up an order, open purchase order entry etc. Azure times now match or beat the production Citrix environment

That's good information. Thanks for sharing your results with the group!

unknown

Hi Todd, Have moved any farther along in your Azure deployment? Any user deployment yet?

unknown

We are holding off for now for budget reasons. We will revisit later in the year. Few items still to work out - local directories, db backups, process to refresh dev and qa, dbmail, and connection Access and Excel to the database in Azure. So most of it is backend stuff. DBmail should be easy, except maybe for an SMTP relay. Access and Excel are worrisome. I can manually set the local directory and have it use onedrive, but the trouble is automating that on a per user basis and prepopulating ini files and a few other items for new logins.

Just a few items. We expect to migrate at the end of the year.

unknown

Just a quick update. We are building our production environment now. Should have users testing within a couple of weeks. Most work to now has been around leveraging OneDrive in the WVM's. Defaulting all the users config file in there OneDrive, so getting the connection up automatically and making the exceptions on the WVM's for MfA. Setting the scripts for starting Visual to check for Visual.ini and create/populate the config folder in OneDrive if it is not there.

Need to do some work on exempting the program directories from realtime scans. Security software is really slowing things down, but once you get around it thing look good. 25% reduction in time to run a full regen in MRP before an real optimization.

Only real snag is that we will probably have to run full desktop rather than just application presentation, but that is not that big a deal since incorporating OneDrive and the ability to run Outlook in the same environment will be big pluses.

Thanks,

Todd Dickinson

unknown

In production for 2 weeks now. Tweaked a bunch of things and think we finally have it in a really good state. After we got the environment set up the actual move from UAT to Production was done in less than 4 hours. Most of the issues were users that couldn't be bothered to attend training/ didn't pay attention in training/ didn't bother to participate in UAT.

Interesting, turning off caching was the best thing for performance (beyond regular DB maintenance). Running compute/CPU optimized VM for Azure virtual desktop.

OneDrive integration is great. Users save to Documents/Desktop on the AVD and the file show up in Documents/Desktop on their machine. Makes is really easy to handle the files from reports/exports.

Best thing is it is costing half of what it cost us in Citrix.

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