Is installing ArcGIS Portal on a new server the only way to make a cold standby?

Question

Historically, my company has created cold standby versions of our AGS infrastructure by cloning the virtual machine (thereby creating Machine_2) and then keeping the data/services/configuration of Machine_2 synced.

Since Common problems and solutions—Portal for ArcGIS (10.8) | Documentation for ArcGIS Enterprise  says that machines cannot be renamed, that approach will no longer work. Migrate to a new machine in ArcGIS Enterprise using the WebGIS DR tool  recommends using the WebGIS DR tool instead.

Is there any way to avoid having to build an AGS/Portal/Data Store server from scratch prior to running the WebGIS DR tool?

ZianChoy · Answer

Thanks for the encouragement. It sounds like something to try after my company's moved to 10.7.1. Maybe I'll try doing it during a conference...

1. Mess with PowerShell/Chef scripts

2. Ask for help during the daytime

3. Go to step 1

BenTurrell · Answer

Zian Choy‌,

I have done a fair amount of work with Chef and I always struggled to get it working properly. Chef has recently changed its licensing and I'm interested to see what Esri does in terms of supporting it now.

The way software deployment seems to be going is more towards devops which means deploying software in a more repeatable method. The initial setup for these scripts can take a bit longer than doing a manual install and then cloning a machine however you will start to see benefit when you need to upgrade. Upgrading using these powershell scripts is often as simple as downloading the newest version of the script and copying in your config files and away it goes.

These powershell scripts have a config file that allows you to set a domain user or user account that you specify. You can see the sample config files here: arcgis-powershell-dsc/BaseDeployment-SingleMachine.json at master · Esri/arcgis-powershell-dsc · GitHub

There are sample scripts for single machine delpoyment, multi machine deployment and more here:

arcgis-powershell-dsc/SampleConfigs/v3/Base Deployment at master · Esri/arcgis-powershell-dsc · GitHub

Let me know if you have any other questions.

Thanks,

Ben

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ZianChoy · Answer

>automation?

I spent some time with Chef back in the days of 10.5 (and maybe 10.6). Unfortunately, I was not able to get it to work (Web Adaptor Installer Quits If Site Already Exists · Issue #116 · Esri/arcgis-cookbook · GitHub ; also, if IIS has more than 1 default binding (e.g. port 80 is bound to HTTP, port 443 is HTTPS, and port 443 is also bound explicitly to "abc.example.net" with a different SSL certificate), then the installer fails).

My firm once paid an ESRI tech advisor to walk us through installing 10.7 and it involved a lot of manual workarounds. As an example, my documents include the following steps:

After AGS finishes making a new site, change the service's log-on user to datacenter\esri_admin. Then, give that account full control over the c:\program files\ArcGIS,c:\arcgisserver, and c:\python27 folders.

...many steps later...

Remove the auto-created arcgis account from Windows.

Similarly, for Web Adaptor, we found that after WA is installed and the browser window pops up:

If the browser's address bar says localhost, change it to the machine's fully qualified domain name (e.g. stoutweb1.datacenter.local).

>ever supported

That's true. My company has never used Portal before. We were hoping to keep the amount of extra Portal-induced work to a minimum. Having to tell people that we can't clone VMs any more seems a bit severe.