Consolidation and migration of Enterprise 10.9.1 to Azure

[JeffK]

Hello, we are planning to move our on-premises enterprise 10.9.1 servers to Azure keeping the same version for now. We currently have 6 servers on-prem - enterprise, web portal, web adapter, datastore, MS SQL Standard, and license server. We wanted to try with just 2 servers in Azure. I've looked into the process and see we can use WebGIS DR to restore our data but am curious what would be the best way to build this out. I was thinking to start with an install of enterprise server on server 1 and MS SQL on server 2, then add the other roles. Has anyone done any similar types of installations or consolidations? Would it be best to install the portal, web adapter, and datastore on the enterprise server and maybe just add the license role on the SQL server or is there another role that would be ok to run alongside the SQL? The Azure VM resources can be increased to meet demands and our usage is not very high.

I'll continue looking through documentation, but any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Jeff 

[David_Brooks]

Hey @JeffK  I'd be careful using webgisdr for any restoration workflows on anything other than the setup it was implemented on. Scaling down a multi machine deployment to a couple of machines on a different network will undoubtedly render any backups from your prem setup useless, as the intermachine comms are written into many components/config files that would be really tricky to repoint. 

My advice would be to perform a fresh install and if you don't have a huge amount of services, then manually publish from existing mxds/aprxs (you can retrieve from the systeminput folder for each service and use python to publish if needed).

If you needed to copy over web apps, then agol assistant is a great tool for connecting portals together for copying.

[RyanUthoff]

I've used the WebGISDR to consolidate a multi-machine deployment (Portal, 2 servers, data store) to a single machine. It worked fine for me. They key is ensuring your destination public URL is the same as your source public URL. This can be easily done by modifying your hosts file in the destination environment. Below is a good blog post from Esri describing how to do it.

https://www.esri.com/arcgis-blog/products/arcgis-enterprise/administration/migrate-to-a-new-machine-...

We also migrated from on-prem to AWS. And while we chose not to go the WebGISDR route, our third party GIS consulting firm recommended WebGISDR as an option to do that migration.