Using ArcGIS PowerShell DSC for upgrades

[IhabHassan]

Hi,

Has anyone tried to upgrade an ArcGIS Enterprise (that is deployed manually or using Enterprise Builder) by the DSC PowerShell module?

[JustinMallinckrodt]

Hello Ihab - We have a pretty extensive repository located here Windows PowerShell DSC for ArcGIS Enterprise, Desktop & Pro (esri.github.io)

Do you have a specific question we can try to answer?

[IhabHassan]

Thanks @JustinMallinckrodt  for sharing the GitHub page, I didn't have that before, I always go to the GitHub repo. 
We are trying to choose the best available method to automate Enterprise upgrades, we are anticipating to get a lot of these from our clients. 
A lot of these deployments are done either manually, few were built using other automation tools. We are doing a lot of POCs to prove that we can upgrade such deployments safely using the DSC module, hence my question in the post.
We were able to upgrade an Enterprise (using the DSC) that was originally deployed using Enterprise builder on a single machine. We are still trying to cover more complex scenarios.

Something else we are trying to discover, could be another question, if we use the DSC module to deploy or upgrade an Enterprise that relies on load balancers instead of web adaptors.
Any insights in these areas are really appreciated.
Thanks.

[tigerwoulds]

Ihab - I had this same question recently. Can we retrofit/upgrade a manually launched Enterprise environment with DSC? Untested hypothesis but depending on the complexity of the current architecture, there's a good chance you'll run into errors/conflicts. 

The direction I took was to take vm snapshots and a webgisdr full backup, uninstall Enterprise (remove any remnants/arcgis folders), re-deploy the Enterprise with DSC (ensure the architecture/configurations match what was previously in place), then run a webgisdr restore/import. This seemed like the cleanest approach and in my case, everything worked as expected. For some context we have a multi machine deployment, multi machine arcgis server site, mission server, geoevent server, and a host for web adaptors.