topic Restore to standby environment per component (ArcGIS Datastore, ArcGIS for Server, Portal for ArcGIS) in High Availability and Disaster Recovery Questions

Restore to standby environment per component (ArcGIS Datastore, ArcGIS for Server, Portal for ArcGIS)

NicolasGIS — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 07:40:51 GMT

Hello,

Running quite often webgisdr backup and restore to standby environment to maintain availability while upgrading the "master" one, I really miss a functionnality: being able to restore a single specific component (ArcGIS Datastore, ArcGIS for Server, Portal for ArcGIS).

Something like:

webgisdr --import --file C:\propfiles\toimport.properties --component Server

It happened quite few times a full webgisdr restore fails at some step (eg: restore of Federated Server or Portal for ArcGIS). For example, lately I got a "Connexion reset" after restoring an ArcGIS Server. Rebooting Server fixed it strangely... But then I had to rerun a full webgisdr restore and wait again 10 hours for unzipping / restore relational datastore / restore tileCache datastatore / restore hosting server. It's a big waste of time and very annoying when planning an intervention ! You basically need to postpone for the next day.

I don't think this functionnality exists. There are the export/import site operations avaible for both Portal for ArcGIS and ArcGIS for Server but I am under the impression that it is solely meant to be used on the "master" environment and not the standby. For example, ArcGIS Server directory paths must be the same while with webgisdr it is not required:

https://enterprise.arcgis.com/en/portal/latest/administer/windows/overview-disaster-recovery-replication.htm#ESRI_SECTION1_C2CCF3D59BAE4F93AAF841EED439FE2F

So I guess webgisdr is doing some additional/different configurations while importing the exported site located in the webgisdr zip file.

Any thought about it @JonathanQuinn maybe ? Did I miss anything ? I would love to be wrong !

Thanks,

Best regards,

Nicolas

Re: Restore to standby environment per component (ArcGIS Datastore, ArcGIS for Server, Portal for ArcGIS)

Scott_Tansley — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 07:42:14 GMT

if you log into an ArcGIS Server on 'say' https://localhost:6443/arcgis/admin then on the first screen there is an option to export site and import site. A simple script will let you call the export site on a regular basis as a REST call.

The same concept exists for the Enterprise portal using https://localhost:7443/arcgis/portaladmin

And in the command line tools for the Data Stores, your can backup and restore just a single datastore, relational/tile-cache etc.

I believe that WebGISDR just sends messages to the same API, it just pulls the results together and packages them. So a belt and braces approach would see you make individual calls to each API and also to webgisdr.

Re: Restore to standby environment per component (ArcGIS Datastore, ArcGIS for Server, Portal for ArcGIS)

NicolasGIS — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 07:48:05 GMT

Thanks @Scott_Tansley for your reply.

But that what I mean: export site / import site on standby does not behave the same as a webgisdr restore. When I tried that, the standby ArcGIS Server started pointing to my production shared directories ! I wonder if it did not deploy the folder to them as well ! Fortunately, it was without consequences...

Re: Restore to standby environment per component (ArcGIS Datastore, ArcGIS for Server, Portal for ArcGIS)

Scott_Tansley — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 07:53:22 GMT

Sorry, I should have read more of your original post.

Is you standby not isolated? Most of my clients don't run standby, but those that do have the standay in a VLAN, so that otcan't communicate with the master. That means that you can have exactly the same machine names etc, and you just change DNS entries to make standby into master.

Sorry I'd made assumption of your infrastructure.

Re: Restore to standby environment per component (ArcGIS Datastore, ArcGIS for Server, Portal for ArcGIS)

JonathanQuinn — Fri, 07 Jun 2024 14:11:47 GMT

You aren't wrong; you can't restore a single component using the DR tool. If you need to restore a single component, then you can extract the backup using 7zip or another compression utility and use the APIs as noted by @Scott_Tansley. Note that for the Server restore, there are two "branches" of the restore; one for the DR tool that honors target properties/configurations, and one that called by just running importSite, which uses the properties/configurations in the incoming backup. The difference is why you see your target environment use the source environment directories. Two approaches:

1. Restore using importSite and then update directories and re-register additional machines (if applicable), as the restore using just the importSite branch will remove all but one machine.

2. Restore programmatically and pass in the "mode":"dr" property into the importSite operation. This is what the DR tool does to achieve a "data only" restore, vs "data and settings".

I'm curious though, can you describe how long each component takes to restore, and how much data you have in each?

Re: Restore to standby environment per component (ArcGIS Datastore, ArcGIS for Server, Portal for ArcGIS)

TimHaverlandNOAA — Thu, 14 Nov 2024 16:01:45 GMT

@JonathanQuinn can you tell me how one programmatically runs an import site operation with "mode":"dr"? The python API import_site only has one parameter: location. REST API for 10.9.1 also only has a location parameter.

Re: Restore to standby environment per component (ArcGIS Datastore, ArcGIS for Server, Portal for ArcGIS)

NicolasGIS — Wed, 18 Dec 2024 10:25:20 GMT

Thanks @JonathanQuinn ! This is exactly what I was looking for. It is super useful !

Last night, while testing the new objectStore, the restore of the latter took 14 hours (cf. https://community.esri.com/t5/high-availability-and-disaster-recovery-questions/can-t-backup-arcgis-enterprise-11-4-webgisdr-since/m-p/1567875) but failed with another weird issue for ArcGIS Server (something like "ArcSOC PID XYZ not ready" or something like that). I restarted ArcGIS Server service, and run the import site operation for ArcGIS Server with "mode:dr" and Portal for ArcGIS and it worked like charm ! I spared yet another 15 hours of my time !

I don't understand why you don't document it. Super powerful. Thanks again for sharing.

Re: Restore to standby environment per component (ArcGIS Datastore, ArcGIS for Server, Portal for ArcGIS)

NicolasGIS — Wed, 18 Dec 2024 10:14:17 GMT

@TimHaverlandNOAA, this is a non-documented parameter so it won't be in ArcGIS API for Python.

You should use tool like Postman or so, in order to make manually the POST to "importSite" with the additional parameter "mode:dr" in order to make it work.