Setting up an Alternating Production and Development/Staging Environment for ArcGIS Portal

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09-05-2017 09:38 AM
CollinPullara
New Contributor

I am trying to create a situation in which I have two ArcGIS Portal accounts, one will be for production and another for development/staging.  When moving stuff from staging to production, I actually want to just switch my portal DNS to the staging environment, and then use the former production environment for staging and development.  Is there a proper way to do this?  Is it possible to create this type of setup with the licensing as is for ArcGIS?  What would I need to do to ensure smooth transition from one server to another?

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JakeSkinner
Esri Esteemed Contributor

Hi Collin,

With Portal's licensing you can use the same license for both your staging and production environment.  To move content between the two Portal instances I would recommend using Collaboration, which is new at 10.5.1:

About distributed collaboration—Portal for ArcGIS (10.5.x) | ArcGIS Enterprise 

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JakeSkinner
Esri Esteemed Contributor

Hi Collin,

With Portal's licensing you can use the same license for both your staging and production environment.  To move content between the two Portal instances I would recommend using Collaboration, which is new at 10.5.1:

About distributed collaboration—Portal for ArcGIS (10.5.x) | ArcGIS Enterprise 

Natalie_Runyan
New Contributor III

jskinner-esristaff

Can you recommend an answer for those of us still at 10.4.1 (windows). I upgraded to 10.5.1 last month specifically to use Distributed Collaboration, but we had issues and because of time constraints, reverted our servers to the pre-upgrade image.

I have users creating content (maps, apps, services - hosted on our own GIS Server) in a development environment, and I want to migrate the content to production. They currently have separate named-user authorizations in both Dev and Prod built on their active directory login (the same login in both Dev and Prod). Our Portal Identity store uses LDAP and all our AD logins are in the production domain, while our dev server is on a different subdomain.

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JakeSkinner
Esri Esteemed Contributor

Natalie M Runyan‌ I would recommend using ArcGIS Online Assistant or Geo-Jobe Admin Tools to transfer the content between your portal instances.

AnthonyRyanEQL
Occasional Contributor III

Jake,

Can you tell us if there are any technical limitations with Collaboration? I believe your suggestion would only work if it was related to hosted services using the datastore. I was at the Australian UC recently and was interested in this for services based off an enterprise geodatabase and the presenter wasn't sure if it was even possible yet.

Thanks

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PaulDavidson1
Occasional Contributor III

Hi Colin:

I would think that your idea of swapping Test and Prod back and forth via a DNS map could be very problematic.

I would think you're better off using a migration tool like Jake has shown to move Test up to Prod.

That is the standard development method.  Well, standard is typically Dev/Test/Prod with maybe an Acceptance box for some systems.

If you're the only one ever using Portal, maybe you could make that work.  I couldn't, I'd forget where I was.

But in a true Portal environment, you have lots of users doing things.  Before you swap that Prod box to test, you have to migrate that work to Test  so you can swap it to Prod, etc....  While you do that, more things can be going on in  Prod.  Seems problematic... 

Maybe I didn't follow your intent?