VectorH includes a full Vector installation on a single node (referred to as the master node), including the complete Vector toolset, the Ingres front-end, and the X100 engine. Client applications connect to the Ingres front-end on this node.

The engine creates a distributed query plan that is communicated to all nodes participating in the query execution (referred to as the slave nodes). These nodes are running the engine, which is installed automatically during VectorH setup.

All X100 engines on the master node and slave nodes participate in query execution. The engines may communicate intermediate query results to each other when needed. Partial query results get communicated from the slave engines to the master engine. The partial results get aggregated and the end result is sent back to the client. Because of this architecture, the VectorH master node and all the slave nodes are installed on Hadoop DataNodes to ensure data locality and local access to the database files.