2 web adaptors on one Web Server

Question

I am planning on setting up 2 ArcGIS server sites. 1 site will be used to publish dynamic vector data (GIS servers), and other site will be used to publish raster data (Image servers).

ArcGIS servers will be placed behind the firewall, and web adaptor will be installed on Web Server (IIS) in DMZ.

I am wondering if there is any best practice when it comes to installing ArcGIS web adaptors. Can I install web adaptors for both sites on one web server, or would it be better solution to have one web server for each site if the server cost is not in the consideration.

Thank you

Martin

JonathanQuinn · Answer

How many individual sites you have shouldn't really be a factor. If you're interested in a multi-machine site, just make sure you have machine redundancy, (multiple server machines), a fault-tolerant load balancer, resilient file shares for the config-store and directories, and if you're using the web adaptor, multiple web servers with the web adaptors installed. The load balancer will send traffic to the web adaptors which in turn forward the traffic on to the Servers. If you're not using IWA, there's really no need to use the web adaptors and you can just send traffic straight from the load balancer to the Servers.

You can also look into just using the web adaptor, but you'd need to use something like DNS load balancing to account for redundancy at the web tier.

Round-robin DNS - Wikipedia

What Is DNS Load Balancing? | NGINX

MartinSirkovsky1 · Answer

Thank for the reply Thomas.

I was aware of that option, but I was just wondering pros and cons of the different solutions. I found lot of examples on documentation about installing high availability solution with multiple web adaptors, but didn't find anything on when installing 2 separate ArcGIS server site. They will be in the same network, but one site will be installed as GIS server role, and other site as Image server role. Are you able to comment on this?

ThomasNoble · Answer

Hi Martin,

You can install multiple web adaptors on the same machine if they do not use identical naming conventions. If you wanted to use the same name for both web adaptors, they would need to be installed on separate servers.

For example, you can install two web adaptors called 'arcgis' and 'webgis' on the same machine, but you cannot install two web adaptors called 'arcgis' and 'arcgis' on the same machine.

Additional information can be found here: Web Adaptor Deployment Scenarios

Best,

Thomas