Migrate Web AppBuilder app from 10.7.1 to 10.8.1

[tigerwoulds]

We recently deployed a new version of Enterprise 1081. We have several maps/apps/services on 1071. I am planning to re-publish the REST services to 1081 and rebuild my maps there. But I have spent a significant amount of time on configuring Web AppBuilder apps..is there a way to load these directly into the new 1081 Portal and point it to the new map. Ideally without the 1081 Developer Edition. 

Thanks

[berniejconnors]

Tiger,

      we have upgraded our ArcGIS Servers several times and we have never needed to republish any of our Web AppBuilder apps.  The secret to achieving this is - the address of our REST services never changes.  We just completed an upgrade from 10.2.2 to 10.7.1.  During the build and configuration of the 10.7.1 environment all of our map service traffic was directed to the 10.2.2 servers by our proxy servers.  Then when it was time to go live with 10.7.1 we changed the proxy servers to direct the map service traffic to the 10.7.1 servers.  None of our users were aware of the change.  They still send their map service requests to https://geonb.snb.ca/arcgis/rest/services.  We have to operate this way because our servers are public facing.

Best regards,

Bernie.

[tigerwoulds]

Interesting, thanks for the response. I am trying to wrap my head around this since I am a GIS Analyst by training that was recently pulled into the GIS Admin role. You mentioned upgrading ArcGIS Server, is this standalone ArcGIS Server upgrades or ArcGIS Enterprise upgrades? 

[berniejconnors]

Tiger,

        We have not deployed Portal so I guess really all we did was upgrade ArcGIS Server.  But I think the principles are still the same.  You want all of the URLs for your map services to be the same between your 10.7.1 environment and your 10.8.1 environment.  This means all of your web apps that used your 10.7.1 servers will continue to work on your 10.8.1 servers.

        We published all of our map services with ArcMap.  We maintained the MXD documents so they did not change between upgrades.  All of our data sources are file geodatabases and we maintained those in the same location as well.  All we had to do was republish each MXD as a map service onto the new servers (this will be the same if you are using ArcGIS Pro project files to publsih your map services).  And as I said in my previous post we use proxy servers to receive all of our map service requests at https://geonb.snb.ca/arcgis/rest/services. When it is time to switch the traffic from the old server(s) to the new server(s) we used the proxy servers to redirect all of the map service requests from https://OLDserver/arcgis/services/rest/<map_service_name>/MapServer to  https://NEWserver/arcgis/services/rest/<map_service_name>/MapServer. So in the end our map services all appear to be available at the exact same URL but they are all now running on a new ArcGIS Server infrastructure.  We went from running two ArcGIS servers at 10.2.2 to running three ArcGIS Servers at 10.7.1 for dynamic and tile cached map services - and added a fourth ArcGIS Server to handle new Image services - https://geonb.snb.ca/image/rest/services.

        Do you have any IT support in your organization?  It seems to me what you really need is advice on TCP/IP networking, proxy servers, and server migration.  I have some great server administrators in my organization that handle all of those details for me.  Based on what you have posted your map services and apps are only available to internal staff.  In my situation our map services and apps are available to the entire Internet so it is impeartive that the URL for our REST services does not change between upgrades.

Best regards,

Bernie.

[FionaRenton1]

I have no idea if this works. Transferring map services is easy, but transferring custom web apps is a bit different. I have not done that yet, but did look into it:

Example: Copy content—Portal for ArcGIS | Documentation for ArcGIS Enterprise