Business Central: Is it also suitable for large organizations?

Microsoft Business Central is generally considered ERP software for small and medium-sized enterprises. A common rumor is that Business Central is not suitable for large organizations. But is this rumor actually true? Can large organizations indeed not make use of Microsoft Business Central?

The definition of a large company according to Microsoft

Before examining whether Microsoft Business Central is suitable for large organizations, it is wise to define what constitutes a large company according to Microsoft. A company can be considered large for a variety of reasons, such as the number of users, the size of the database, the number of software programs that use Microsoft APIs, the number of sales orders per day, the number of items in a sales order, and other factors. The most important thing is that it does not matter to Microsoft. The only thing that counts is the amount of resources a company uses. Furthermore, Microsoft understands that we love hard numbers, and additional tests are recommended in advance if your company exceeds any of the following records:

• Records in tables
  1.000 user table records
  800.000 sales invoice header tables
  3.500.000 item ledger entry tables
  17.000.000 general ledger entry tables
• Data
  400 GB or more
  160 GB migrated from an on-premises environment to the cloud using a migration tool
• Browser interactions (such as opening or closing a page or a new tab)
  23 per second
  385.000 in one day
• Web service calls (API, SOAP, OData)
  5.700 in one minute
  2.700.000 in één dag
• Transactions
  6.000 sales orders in one day
  3.300 lines on a single sales order

Large companies and the use of Business Central

If you are a large company looking to use Business Central as ERP software, you should not encounter any more problems than a small or medium-sized company using it. Microsoft, therefore, makes no distinction between a company with one user and a company with, for example, 1,000 users. The storage capabilities are the same.

How a large company uses Business Central

If you use Business Central as a large company, you receive an Azure database upon registration. Within this Azure database, a kind of layer is subsequently created using an intelligent Load Balancer. This layer contains a cluster consisting of five virtual machines. As your BC environment starts to use more resources, the intelligent Load Balancer begins balancing the load, and Business Central scales automatically.

Intelligent Load Balancer

The previously mentioned Load Balancer receives a request from Business Central when it requires more resources, analyzes the CPU usage of the virtual machines, and subsequently places your environment on an underutilized virtual machine. Let’s assume, for example, that your cluster has one virtual machine for BC, Power BI, and Microsoft 365, and that it is running above Microsoft’s recommended usage limit. The Load Balancer recognizes this and immediately transfers Business Central (or another software program) to another virtual machine within your cluster to reduce the usage of the previous virtual machines. As a result, Business Central in your cluster continues to deliver top performance more than 99% of the time.

The Load Balancer initiates load balancing via automatic scaling when the virtual machine reaches 60% of its capacity. The 60% figure is relatively low to start this process, because it is a seamless process that takes place within seconds and is not noticed by the BC user 99% of the time. With this 60%, Microsoft ensures that the virtual machine will most likely never be used at 100%.

But what happens if all 5 virtual machines use 60% or more of their capacity? If your company uses Business Central and all five virtual machines are at more than 60% usage, the Load Balancer automatically creates a sixth, seventh, or as many virtual machines as needed to reduce usage to less than 60%. If the tier or cluster is not the problem, the Azure Database is automatically monitored. All Azure databases have a certain capacity that Microsoft monitors. This capacity within the Azure database includes CPU, Data IO, Log Write, and Max Worker. If database usage reaches 80% of the capacity, Microsoft considers this overloaded and automatically increases it. The result is lower database usage. More information on this can be found on Microsoft’s website.

Business Central for large organizations – Suitable

The answer to the question of whether Business Central is also suitable for large companies is therefore quite simple after the explanation above. Yes, Business Central is suitable for large companies. There is no maximum number of users or data storage. Ultimately, larger companies simply use multiple tiers to distribute usage and ensure a maximum, trouble-free user experience.