We are setting up Portal and are going to have to deal with external requirements keeping some of our ArcGIS servers at previous versions. So far I have identified servers at 10.2 and 10.3 and our SDE is currently at 10.1. I believe I understand that Portal can not be installed at 10.5 due to underlying gdb changes (not sure how this effects portal, it doesnt seem to do that). What is best Portal practice in this situation. The other servers are being held back by much larger projects which will move along albeit very slowly into new versions.
I'm not sure I follow the part about Portal and GDB changes, but there shouldn't be a problem with using Portal with previous versions of ArcGIS Server. You won't be able to federate, but I'm not sure you have anyway. You can add items directly to the map viewer or to your My Content. All of the security will still be controlled by the Server.
Thanks for the response. We were planning on using a hosting server which as far as I can tell includes federation.
We wanted to do this for the ability to host our own tile packages, but if Portal can consume them anyway then it shouldn't matter. We would just post those to our current server and then pull them through.
This then begs the question of why someone would go to more trouble for a federated or hosting server if it doesn't really gain you anything.
The hosting Server and Portal have to be on the same version, so you may want to stand up a dedicated hosting Server so you can keep it in sync with the Portal.
The hosting server gives you a number of extended functionalities and tools that can't be accessed without a hosting server. The matrix in the link below will outline them the best:
About using your portal with ArcGIS Server—Portal for ArcGIS (10.5.x) | ArcGIS Enterprise
Right, Ive seen that matrix, thats how we decided we wanted to run the hosting server. So I guess a separate portal cant consume a hosted tile package, or a package cant be hosted without a hosting server.
Back to having Portal pinned on our server I guess.
Thanks.