Clone Entire Production Enterprise Environment

Question

I have a pretty robust (lots of content) 11.1 deployment that consists of 4 boxes (2 servers, 1 portal, 1 datastore).  I also have a dev environment that consists of the same 4 boxes.  When I went to 11.2, I of course first installed it on my dev boxes (that contain only a handful of services and maps/apps) and everything seemed to go fine.  It was only once I put 11.2 on prod that a slew of stability issues appeared, resulting in us having to revert to 11.1.

This time around, I am trying to more thoroughly stress test before upgrading: I would like a clone of my production environment (the hundreds of services, maps, and apps) in dev to be able to stress test 11.3 to really know what I'm getting myself into.  The problem is I'm not sure what the best way to do this is.  It seems like the backup/restore tools are more suited for... that.  I did find this content transfer workflow using Groups and import/export (Moving content across tiered ArcGIS Enterprise environments (esri.com)) but this seems inefficient (requires getting all my content grouped) and won't be an exact clone of all the settings/load that the prod environment has.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

NicolasGIS · Answer

I faced the same issue: personnaly, I am using the solution described on this great blog post:

https://www.esri.com/arcgis-blog/products/arcgis-enterprise/administration/migrate-to-a-new-machine-in-arcgis-enterprise-two/

And modifying DNS hosts file.
It’s really easy and been proven useful for me.

Scott_Tansley · Answer

Have a word with your IT department to see if they have any toys that could help. For example, one of my clients uses a tool called Zerto (https://www.zerto.com/).  A similar tool would be ASR (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/site-recovery) in MS Azure, and I'm sure there are many others.

In essence, they have a sandpit environment that has a mirror of their AD and supporting services, this is refreshed regularly.  When they want to do something like you've suggested, they use Zerto to 'push' clones into that environment. They have to do some work with DNS etc, but it gives them an isolated environment of exactly what they have in production.  We've used it to good effect several times for testing concepts.

Have a chat with your IT department.  If they have an isolated network, it may be as simple as standing up clones of your current machines in a firewalled off environment.