ArcGIS Server High Availability and Publishing Survey123 Forms

[RyanUthoff]

I am currently using ArcGIS Enterprise 10.6.1 and have two ArcGIS Server VMs joined to the same site for high availability and load balancing. We recently experienced an issue with one of the ArcGIS Server VMs and it had to be taken down for maintenance for an extended period of time. Luckily, the other ArcGIS Server VM is fine and everything is working as expected with the exception of Survey123. I am unable to publish new Survey123 forms.

The ArcGIS Data Store is working fine and I can view hosted feature services in Portal just fine, I just can't publish new Survey123 forms. I receive an error: "Create Service exception ' Exception: Connect to host [server name] failed: connect timed out'"

I will add that the server name that it is trying to connect to is the server that is currently down for maintenance. Obviously I expect to be able to publish Survey123 forms once the server comes back online, but I don't understand why I can't publish Survey123 forms when one server is down. Isn't one of the points of high availability that when one server goes down, the other still functions normally and picks up the slack until the other server comes back online? If that is the case, why won't it let me publish new Survey123 even when one server is down?

[JonathanQuinn]

What URLs did you use when federating Portal and Server? My first assumption is the admin URL is set to the machine that is down.

[RyanUthoff]

That is correct, the admin URL is set to the machine name URL of the machine that is down (which was the original server, we've since added a second server to the site).

I always thought that the admin URL has to be the machine name URL of one of the servers. Am I incorrect in thinking that? If so, what should the URL be set to (and would it be possible to update that URL)? Looking back at the documentation, it looks like I can also use the web adaptor URL as the admin URL.

[RyanUthoff]

And reading further, I specifically see the note in the documentation stating when federating with multimachine/HA sites, to use the web adaptor or load balancer URL. Since we started out as a one machine shop, we didn't have to worry about that. Now....it looks like we do.

So I guess my question now is if it is possible to change that URL in a site that is already up in running?

[JonathanQuinn]

There's some documentation on migrating from a standalone environment to HA:

Configure an existing ArcGIS Enterprise deployment for high availability—Portal for ArcGIS (10.6) | ... 

I would go through each step and make sure that your configuration aligns with what it should be, specifically for the privatePortalURL and admin URL properties, (steps 8-10).

[RyanUthoff]

Thank you for the link. We do no have HA Portal/Data Store. Only HA ArcGIS Server. So if that is the case, I would not need to modify the privatePortalURL, correct? It looks like I would not follow steps 8 and 9. And I've followed step 10 as we have already expanded the site. The only thing that we have not done is changed the admin URL for ArcGIS Server to point to the web adaptor URL.

Where specifically do I need to update the admin URL? Is that step 11? It looks like step 11c is where I specify the HA URL, but do I need to change that URL anywhere else first? I just want to make sure I follow the correct steps.

[JonathanQuinn · Accepted solution]

Right, you'll just need to make sure that Portal is using an admin URL that can connect to any of the backend server machines.

Step 10 a describes the URL you need to use to access the API for updating the admin URL:

Sign in to the Portal for ArcGIS REST endpoint (in the format https://loadbalancer.domain.com/arcgis/sharing/rest) as a member of the default administrator role to update the hosting server information.

You should then be able to follow 10b-10e to update the admin URL for the federated servers.

[RyanUthoff]

Ok, that's what I thought. Just wanted to make sure. Thank you for answering my questions!