topic Re: Recommended Server Hardware Specs for Utility Network (Water/Wastewater/Storm) Deployment in Water Utilities Questions

Recommended Server Hardware Specs for Utility Network (Water/Wastewater/Storm) Deployment

Bloper — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 20:28:39 GMT

Hello everyone,

I am looking for guidance on recommended hardware specifications for a server environment that will support a full ArcGIS Utility Network implementation for a municipal organization.

Context:

City population: ~115,000
Utilities to be modeled in the Utility Network:
Water, Wastewater, and Stormwater
Planned deployment includes:
- ArcGIS Enterprise (federated Portal + ArcGIS Server)
- Dedicated ArcGIS Server machine for services
- Dedicated database server hosting the enterprise geodatabases
- Branch versioning
- Multi-user editing
- Heavy daily workflows (editing, QA/QC, field data sync, tracing, geoprocessing, publishing, and UN validations)

We want to ensure that our server environment is sized properly for performance and future growth, especially given the data volumes and editing activity common in utility networks.

My question:

What hardware specifications do you recommend for a deployment of this scale?

Specifically looking for guidance on:

1. ArcGIS Server Machine (Federated with Portal)

CPU (number of cores, speed)
RAM
Storage type and minimum/optimal disk space (SSD vs HDD)
Network throughput considerations
Any recommendations for scaling ArcGIS Server with UN-heavy services

2. Database Server (for Enterprise Geodatabases supporting the Utility Network)

CPU requirements for performant branch versioning and UN edits
Recommended RAM allocation
Storage configuration (RAID, NVMe/SSD arrays, etc.)
Disk I/O recommendations for large datasets and high edit frequency
Whether separate disks for logs/tempDB are significantly beneficial

Any real-world experiences, Esri recommendations, or benchmark-based insights would be extremely helpful.

Thank you in advance for any guidance!

Re: Recommended Server Hardware Specs for Utility Network (Water/Wastewater/Storm) Deployment

RobertKrisher — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 20:39:56 GMT

To properly determine these answers, you'd need to go through a capacity planning exercise that takes into account your specific workflows and expected loads. Outside if that, you can find guidance on the ArcGIS Architecture Library on how to begin to size a system. You can also find reference architectures and test studies that show system utilization for specific logical/physical configurations (with specs of the hardware used).

Re: Recommended Server Hardware Specs for Utility Network (Water/Wastewater/Storm) Deployment

Bloper — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 20:54:44 GMT

Thank you for the reply Robert!
We are starting to work with the Migration to Utility Network tool set and have been enjoying your blogs online. Extremely appreciate all the articles and help documentation that you have provided to the ESRI community. Very helpful!

Re: Recommended Server Hardware Specs for Utility Network (Water/Wastewater/Storm) Deployment

CodyPatterson — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 20:59:30 GMT

Hey @Bloper

These are my specs on my Utility environment Server:

CPU: 16 cores at 2.6 GHz

RAM: 32GB

Storage: 500GB NVMe

Network Throughput: We have two 10Gb cards on the server itself for redundancy, connected to a 40Gb network

In terms of scaling, we use VMWare monitoring tools to distribute resources dynamically when needed

For the Database Server:

CPU: 16 Cores at 2.6 GHz

RAM: 128GB

Storage: Ours is a little overkill, RAID 6, NMVe 4TB

Disk I/O is handled by NVMe, those handle our edits and data changes quite well

We export the logs to a TrueNAS setup offsite, allow us to keep them in slow-drives so the spinning hard drives.

We cover nearly a million addresses which need independent utility allocations, here's a guide on the architecture as well: https://architecture.arcgis.com/en/

Cody

Re: Recommended Server Hardware Specs for Utility Network (Water/Wastewater/Storm) Deployment

RobertKrisher — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 00:03:40 GMT

What @CodyPatterson is describing sounds like about 2x the specs of the reference architecture for a mid-sized gas utility (300k connections). You can find one of the test studies for that architecture (including performance graphs) here: Test Study for a Network Information Management System Gas Utility (SQL Server) | ArcGIS Architecture Center