High availability on Azure

Question

We are trying to build High availability of server + Portal in Azure.

We have a common arcgisserver directory.

It works very slow and we found that there is a lot of requests to this directory that does not work so fast.

Did anybody implemented HA on Azure?

What is the best practice here?

Thanks

MengLi · Answer

We had an Azure AGE deployment (manually installed) with one Portal, one Data Store and 2 Servers accessing config store and content directories from Azure File Share (standard). Two major issues:

1) 2 AGE servers often end up one being stopped in accessing the file share, and we were told some issues for the redundancy servers accessing an Azure file share, and hence to consider blob or a file server VM. But Azure file share is a standard storage resource, and why AGE servers couldn't work well with it? and what are pros and cons of using a Azure File Share and a server VM for the config store?

2) since our Azure AGE upgrade from 10.6.1 to 10.8.1 in mid Match 2021, the cost (based on volume and transactions) of our Azure file share is tripled; and noticed that the daily transactions and traffic from our 2 AGE 10.6.1 servers to Azure file share was 3-5 millions, while after the upgrade to 10.8.1, it is 15 millions, and now after we removed one of the 2 AGE servers, the daily transactions decreased to 10 millions, but still significantly higher than AGE 10.6.1, is it by design? Our Azure contractor argued that he didn't see any server software triggering such huge amount of transactions for accessing a config / content store.

We are planning to relocate our servers config/content store from the Azure File Share to a dedicated file server VM on Azure.

Any other suggestions and experience would be much appreciated.

JonathanQuinn · Answer

You can also look into storing the content in Azure BLOB containers, which gives you redundancy out of the box. It'll be slower than what you get out of the local file system, but perhaps comparable or even faster than what you see in a shared location, depending on your storage tier.

ChristopherPawlyszyn · Answer

Hello @mody_buchbinder,

Can you elaborate a bit further on the shared storage in-use on your ArcGIS Server site? I have seen some performance issues with the standard Azure Files shares as they are not quite responsive enough to host the config-store and directories. The premium shares did alleviate the issues I faced when deploying a multi-machine site, or you may consider hosting a network share on one of the Azure VMs you have deployed already or using a dedicated file server depending on your architecture needs.