Best Practices for Enterprise Environment Upgrade

[CodyPatterson]

Hey all,

 We have just renewed our licenses and were accidentally given 11.2 instead of 11.1 licenses. That is no big deal, we can just email our rep and get that fixed, but I suppose this is opportunity for upgrading.

I've attempted to upgrade before, and it resulted in a complete corruption of our portal environment. I simply followed the steps and had the program state that the upgrade was successful and then nothing was accessible. Our environment is still very new, with no users on it and still no major documents, how do I avoid corrupting our environment again?

I want to be sure this can occur in the future, and we can upgrade our system without issue in the future.

Any advice?

Thanks in advance!

[MarceloMarques · Accepted solution]

There are several options.

1. Take a machine image backup, this can be done for physical machines, VMWare VM's and Cloud VM's. You can work with your IT department.

2. For VMWare VM's, you can create a snapshot and if something goes bad you can simply restore the machine using the snapshot, you will not need to restore the image backup, work with your VMWare Administrator.

3. Create ArcGIS Enterprise Backups and learn how to use the backups to restore ArcGIS Enterprise.

ArcGIS Enterprise Deployments – Portal / Server / Datastore -  Portal webgisdr backup utility

https://enterprise.arcgis.com/en/portal/latest/administer/windows/overview-backup-restore-web-gis.ht...

https://enterprise.arcgis.com/en/portal/latest/administer/windows/create-web-gis-backup.htm

https://enterprise.arcgis.com/en/portal/latest/administer/windows/restore-web-gis.htm

• The backup for each component is placed in a temporary directory on each component's machine before being moved to the shared directory you specify.
• Therefore, the following directories must be large enough to contain the backup of each component:
• Portal for ArcGIS: <Portal_content_directory>/temp
• ArcGIS Server: <ArcGIS_Server_installation_directory>/temp
• ArcGIS Data Store: <ArcGIS_Data_Store_directory>/temp

ArcGIS Server Deployments

https://enterprise.arcgis.com/en/server/latest/develop/windows/backup-utility.htm

https://enterprise.arcgis.com/en/server/latest/develop/windows/restore-utility.htm

ArcGIS DataStore

https://enterprise.arcgis.com/en/data-store/latest/install/windows/data-store-utility-reference.htm

describedatastore

updatebackupschedule

configurebackuplocation

backupdatastore

deletebackup

listbackups

restoredatastore

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Tip: create a development ArcGIS Enterprise deployment and practice the upgrade before you actually upgrade your production deployment.

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I hope this helps.

[CodyPatterson]

Good Morning Marcelo,

 Thank you for the great resources, I appreciate it greatly!

I've reached out to our director of IT and they are currently in the process of taking snapshots prior to the next upgrade attempt. I've also attempted to use the webgisdr tool to create a backup of our site, but something very unusual happens, whenever the backup is completed, it deletes the file with no warning. I've verified that it is accumulating data in the folder it should, and once the command prompt finishes, the file vanishes without a trace, do my output logs seem unusual? (Screenshot edited for internal security) There is 155TB able to be used in our backup server and the entire site is less than 2GB:

I'm not aware of the relational data store request, this machine has been restarted since last backup attempt.

Any thoughts?

[MarceloMarques]

You can try to save the backup on local disk, make sure you have the latest ArcGIS Enterprise Patches installed, if you still encounter an issue then open a ticket with Esri Technical Support to investigate further.

[CodyPatterson]

Thank you for the response Marcelo,

 I was not able to get it to work that way as well, looks like it's off to ESRI support, I appreciate the help!