Planning for Enteprise

Question

I have been trying to do my homework when planning to eventually implement ArcGIS Enterprise but I have found limited resources finding information  related to adequate hardware, infrastructure, architecture for running Enterprise.  I  am trying to plan for success but I having a hard time answering questions how many cores should new servers have, how much ram, etc..  I am in organization with  about 75 users, probably 20 of which would possibly edit.  Its really hard to say how many viewers once portal is deployed with web maps  (located at a Military Base).   Does anyone have any suggestions or links that might offer some assistance.

BenTurrell · Answer

Hey Spencer Larson‌,

I would have a chat with your Esri contact as they will let you know if they can help out with this sort of work.

Depending on your level of database knowledge you may consider just using a relational data store which you will need to build when you do an enterprise build. When you publish hosted feature layers you can specify if people can edit the data which will allow people to edit the data using ArcGIS Pro or a variety of other products (Collecter, Survery123).

For your servers I would recommend you start out with one as you grow the capability in your agency and give it 32GB of RAM and 4 cores. You can always split the capabilities off on to separate machines at a later stage.

When we talk about high availability, active-active, active-passive we are talking about what happens if the server breaks. High availability generally means that you double up on everything so if one machine breaks the other one takes over. This is a more complex build and requires more administration so I would advise that you be aware of it and should you need to host mission critical data you look into it.

When we talk about balancing the load there are a few ways people interpret that. WE do multi site machines which is each machine has its own capability on it (seperate Portal, Server and Datastore onto their own machines). Multi machine generally aims to remove bottle necks and allows you to spec the machine as required for the capability. You can also balance load using two machines that are built identically and then you can share traffic between the two which helps to alleviate load.

A single machine installation will be the quickest and easiest to manage and will allow you to experience/test the capabilities that Enterprise has to offer. There are plenty of tools that you can use to monitor its usage and determine when you want to upgrade it to a more powerful machine, multi-site or load balanced. How long a single machine build will really depend on your agencies uptake of the Enterprise stack.

If you have any more questions please don't hesitate to ask!

Thanks,

Ben

SpencerLarson · Answer

Ben-  Below are some responses.  I am learning as I go so I appreciate any additional feedback you can provide.  My current thought is to have a 2 server configuration with a SAN for increased storage each with 32 GB Ram and each having 4 cores.  I am trying to plan for now and the future but these servers/SAN would be also hosting a repository of asbuilts and drawings associated with installation facilities as well having backups.  With all that being said does ESRI have folks that can work to make recommendations. I am under a ELA but not sure if there is this type of support as part of the agreeement.

Thanks

Spencer

Some considerations and questions I ask before I do a deployment are:

* What capabilities do you need?  Initially a multiuser editing environment (enterprise gdb), then eventually portal, web maps, apps.
* How much downtime can users experience? (This leads to the next three questions)  Not sure what this questions is referring to.  The ideal would be to have users editing and viewing to not have performance issues and lag.
* Does the environment need to be highly available? (Active- Active This doubles the amount of machines and licenses usually)  Again not sure what this means, the environment would be accessible via a LAN, I don't quite understand  how web editing work so I am not sure if this is what you are referring to being highly available
* Do you want a backup system in place? (Active-Passive This doubles the amount of machines but since only one Enterprise is running at a time you can reuse the licenses)  Yes, backup is desired and planned.
* What sort of data will be stored in the Enterprise system? (This helps you to understand the amounts of data you are likely going to need to store and backup)  Vector/Raster Data, maps, eventually webmaps and other items associated with Portal
* How many people will be administering the system?(How simple does the system need to be so that the admins don't get overwhelmed by the amount of work. Leads into the next question as well.)  I envision maybe 1-2  people part time administering the system.  I guess another question is this a full time job, isn't most of the work just managing permissions
* Do you want everything on one machine or each capability to have its own machine? (This depends on the capabilities you want as some need to have their own server for basic performance. Single site vs multi site build)  I think we planning to using two servers to balance the load as that seems recommended.
* What load are you expecting? (Internal users only?, External users?)  Here at my location we have about 80 GIS users at varying levels.  I would expect about half to actually edit data and half to just be users.  As for external users accessing web maps, thats really hard to gage at this point as I work on a military base but I would think no more than 100 individuals would be accessing the portal at one time even thought the total installation population is over 30,000 (soldiers, government staff, and contractors)

Most of my builds use the following principles:

4 Cores, 8GB RAM is a minimum for all capabilities (Note: Minimum means it will start, users will not have a very good experience using the minimum!!)  According to what I read I thought you had to have 16 GB Ram at a miniumum

Using the above advice if I was building a test deployment of Enterprise (ArcGIS Portal, Server (Hosting), and Datastore (relational)) on a single machine I would be looking at 4 core and 24GB of RAM. For a multiple machine deployment for the same ( 3 machines with Portal, Server and Datastore on their own machine) I would look at each machine being 4 core 8GB of RAM.

Again the above machines would not deal very well with more than 5 or so users and a handful or services. I would start off with 4 core and 12GB for each service in a multi machine deployment.

I'm sure I've missed obvious things above so I'm more than happy to discuss!

Thanks,

Ben

BenTurrell · Answer

Hey Spencer Larson‌,

Some considerations and questions I ask before I do a deployment are:

* What capabilities do you need?
* How much downtime can users experience? (This leads to the next three questions)
* Does the environment need to be highly available? (Active- Active This doubles the amount of machines and licenses usually)
* Do you want a backup system in place? (Active-Passive This doubles the amount of machines but since only one Enterprise is running at a time you can reuse the licenses)
* What sort of data will be stored in the Enterprise system? (This helps you to understand the amounts of data you are likely going to need to store and backup)
* How many people will be administering the system?(How simple does the system need to be so that the admins don't get overwhelmed by the amount of work. Leads into the next question as well.)
* Do you want everything on one machine or each capability to have its own machine? (This depends on the capabilities you want as some need to have their own server for basic performance. Single site vs multi site build)
* What load are you expecting? (Internal users only?, External users?)

Most of my builds use the following principles:

4 Cores, 8GB RAM is a minimum for all capabilities (Note: Minimum means it will start, users will not have a very good experience using the minimum!!)

Using the above advice if I was building a test deployment of Enterprise (ArcGIS Portal, Server (Hosting), and Datastore (relational)) on a single machine I would be looking at 4 core and 24GB of RAM. For a multiple machine deployment for the same ( 3 machines with Portal, Server and Datastore on their own machine) I would look at each machine being 4 core 8GB of RAM.

Again the above machines would not deal very well with more than 5 or so users and a handful or services. I would start off with 4 core and 12GB for each service in a multi machine deployment.

I'm sure I've missed obvious things above so I'm more than happy to discuss!

Thanks,

Ben

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