Hello,
We have a 5 machine ArcGIS Server v10.6.1 site hosting ~200 services and relying on "clustering" to manage machine VM size and isolate services from each other. Clusters have been deprecated at v10.7.x and we are assessing upgrade options (to v10.8.1).
Each server runs in its own cluster and ~1/5 of the services are in each cluster (so each machine is hosting ~40 services). ~20-25% of the services are 'active' daily, while the other ~75-80% of the services have sporadic use. We believe the Esri "Shared Instance Pool" configuration is a candidate for the majority of the services on the stack.
Problem is, this environment was built in JULY 2010 (literally within 30 days of ArcGIS Server v10.1 general availability) and ALL services published were from ArcMap. So... per the docs, it seems we would have to re-publish all services using ArcGIS PRO to take advantage of the new "Shared Instances" model.
We have been looking into developing scripts to mass convert ArcMap documents (MXD) to ArcPRO projects (APRX), then re-publish with an 'overwrite' option so that we can take advantage of the shared instances.
As part of this effort, we discovered that we can just make Admin API calls to 'changeProvider'. More specifically, it appears that an "ArcMap" published service sets the provider to "ArcObjects" while an ArcGIS PRO published service sets the provider to "ArcObjects11". A service running in the shared instance pool has a provider=DMaps.
We were unable to directly update the provider from ArcObjects->DMaps (and vise versa DMaps -> ArcObjects), however...
we were successful in making an API call to
1) convert provider=ArcObjects -> ArcObjects11
2) then a second API call to convert ArcObjects11 -> DMaps.
As part of that, we did set the min/max instances to 0 (since thats what the 'manager' GUI did as well when manually converting a "PRO Published" service to the shared instance pool.
We completed basic business testing (map export, query, identify, dynamic layers, etc) and have found no adverse impact yet. We are able to switch ArcMap->Pro->DMaps (and back in same direction) and can see the new ArcSOC.exe "command" path on the server change accordingly.
So.... how viable of an approach is this? I suspect Esri support would indicate this is not a supported workflow (as my research has yet to find this) but so far seems completely functional. This conversion would allow us to more quickly support a v10.8.1 upgrade, although there is still value in getting our ArcMap documents converted to PRO for future publishing support (if we have to make changes to existing services and re-publish).
Thanks for any info/advise you may have.
Good Resources -