ArcGIS Enterprise on Different Versions of Windows Server

[cjms]

IT wants to upgrade the VMs from Windows Server 2016 to either 2019 or 2022. They'd prefer to do them one at a time, so I'm wondering if there will be any issues if the different components are on different versions of Windows Server.

e.g. if one weekend Portal server goes from Windows Server 2016 to 2019, but everything else is still on 2016, will the environment function as expected?

We're federated with ArcGIS Enterprise 11.1 and would not be changing the version of enterprise during this upgrade.

[CodyPatterson · Accepted solution]

Hey @cjms 

I have a Windows 2016 and 2019 server, both are in the same multi-machine setup and I have not had any issues, prior to installation I would verify that everything is backed up properly as these were not updated into 2019 but instead installed fresh on 2016 and 2019.

This is from 2013, but it does appear that Esri is aware of this possibility and has tested in the past, I wouldn't imagine they would stop testing it since it more than likely is decently common: https://community.esri.com/t5/arcgis-enterprise-questions/using-different-windows-server-versions-in...

Cody

[cjms]

Great! I also found this after looking around that while not explicitly saying they support different versions of windows server, it seems implied. Glad to hear a real world example of it working though.

https://enterprise.arcgis.com/en/portal/11.1/administer/windows/migration-strategies.htm

"In ArcGIS Enterprise, the term migration describes an organization's requirements to move an existing deployment, or portions of it, to a newer or alternate deployment or infrastructure. Migration strategies can be used to move existing content, users and groups, and software."

https://enterprise.arcgis.com/en/portal/11.3/administer/windows/migrate-to-new-machines-with-webgisd...

"Organizations may want to migrate an existing ArcGIS Enterprise organization from one machine (or set of machines) to another. Among the reasons to do this are to migrate to newer hardware or a newer operating system. There are a few common methods for conducting this type of migration, including:

• The Join Site operation
• The Web GIS Disaster Recovery (WebGISDR) tool"

[CalvinHarmin]

For what it's worth, I also know organizations that even have mixed-OS deployments where certain Enterprise machines are Linux while others are Windows. Although ESRI won't recommend or explicitly support this (there can be complications if ArcGIS Servers on different OS want to point to the same config file, for example), since the machines communicate over HTTP on the backend it is somewhat OS-agnostic, if that makes sense.