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Host Arc Services On-Prem

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11-11-2022 09:00 AM
TR_UNC1
Emerging Contributor

Hi. I'm a VM and Windows server admin, not an ArcGIS programmer. We use ArcGIS Pro 3 on Windows 10/11, and we're moving some of our projects to a highly restricted VDI with no Internet access. We have a site license and single sign on access to ArcGIS Online.

I'm trying to figure out how we can host an on-prem copy of ArcGIS Online services such as basemaps, Living Atlas, etc. All of the processing will be done by the Arc Pro clients, so we don't need any server processing and don't want data to be hosted on the server. The local server would be in a DMZ.

If this is possible, do I set up an ArcGIS server for this? Do I need any other components? I'm going through some of the ESRI documentation and tutorials on youtube, but they seem to be focused on hosting and analyzing data on the server.

Thanks.

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7 Replies
TR_UNC1
Emerging Contributor

Or maybe what I need is ArcGIS Enterprise Portal.

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JoshuaBixby
MVP Esteemed Contributor

It seems to me you are in the market for ArcGIS Data Appliance | Documentation

ArcGIS Data Appliance is a content solution with much of the same data that is available through ArcGIS Online services

You could install ArcGIS Enterprise with portal, but that doesn't give you all of the data and services you describe wanting from ArcGIS Online.

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TR_UNC1
Emerging Contributor

Thanks. Is there anything that would give us at least the most used features?

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Brian_Wilson
Honored Contributor

Living Atlas and the basemaps are online services. If you are not going to allow ANY Internet access then it does not matter if you have Enterprise or Server, those can host your own data but when you add a basemap from Living Atlas it still pulls from the Esri Internet servers; it bypasses the local server.

I use a proxy service, but I bet getting it to work with licensed LivingAtlas services would be a walk through the fiery perils of authentication and authorization and not worth the effort. I proxy services that run open and wild on the Internet like state-level aerial photos. A proxy could run on your DMZ and keep a cache of tiles accessed so there would be no direct Internet access, would that be legal for you? I've been working with MapProxy. (see Mapproxy.org) and it works fine for web maps but not with Pro! I am not sure about vector tiles, I use it for raster imagery to add reliability and reduce load times. Frustrating that Pro does not work when Web App Builder is fine, but it could be my set up?  GeoWebCache looks promising too (it is part of Geoserver.org) but the docs are so bad I've never gotten it working (except with Geoserver, which is simple). (The developers basically just say "works for me!" and offer no other suggestions and their samples reference defunct services.)  Please get it going and tell me how.

For sharing your own data internally you can use file geodatabases on a local file server if you don't need concurrent editing.  With Enterprise you get what they call "version control", really it's for concurrent editing so it depends on your use cases. If you don't have 2+ people editing for example tax parcels at the same time then you can just use file geodatabases.

You will want to run a local license manager and use concurrent licensing; the default "named user" licensing will want to use the Internet to phone home every time you start a copy of Pro and periodically thereafter. I run ours in a virtual machine running CentOS. I have some detailed notes on that if you want. I tried to Dockerize it with no success. Esri products heartily resist Dockerization, as does Esri support when you ask for help with Docker. ("Don't do that" was their answer to me, then later "look at this cool Kubernetes thing that you can't use!")

The "Data Appliance" thing looks like it's just selected data that you can install locally, for example, a basemap for North America. Sounds like you don't want to manage large collections of files on your local server? I think this could be for an air-gapped server or for a laptop in Antarctica that needs to work all the time. In the olden days they shipped ArcGIS software on things called "discs" 🙂 and you could install the included data and then discover it required a license key to unlock most of it. This is probably the same product, rebranded?

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DanReid
Emerging Contributor

Data Appliance isn't cheap. In a very similar situation as the original poster, we very carefully opened the necessary ports on the firewall so our ArcGIS Portal server and Pro desktops could get to the basemaps at ArcGIS Online. This had the added benefit of allowing Pro's named user authentication through ArcGIS Online to also work for the clients also behind that firewall, so no need to install LIcense Manager locally.

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TR_UNC1
Emerging Contributor

Thanks, Brian and Dan. Yes, I saw that the appliance is actually a bunch of disks with TB of data, so that's not going to work.

We have a site license for Arc and Arc Server is included, so I'm not concerned about licensing per se. We also can get ESRI Data and Maps with that license, so I'm going to test and see how close that gets us.

Dan, my current server setup sounds like what you describe - the servers go through a proxy to get to ESRI, so everything works well on those but it won't be possible in this new environment to point directly at anything outside of our campus network. That's why I was hoping that we could put an Arc Portal server in a DMZ that points to ESRI, and point clients in the secure space to that portal server. That kinda sorta makes the Arc server a proxy.

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Brian_Wilson
Honored Contributor

I see this https://enterprise.arcgis.com/en/server/latest/deploy/windows/using-a-forward-proxy-server-with-arcg... but that looks like it's telling Server to use a proxy for outside services it needs, not how to proxy for its clients. I've always assumed when I add a WMS based service to Portal that it would hand a URL to Pro and Pro would talk to the original service. My set up would get a lot simpler if I could get it to act as a proxy and cache.

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