When to use single-machine deployment

[MichaelSchoelen]

I have a client with about 5 GIS authors. Their primary job is to create basic web maps and story maps for their clients. At any given moment, there might be 25-50 people viewing the end product. All in all, I don't view this as a highly stressed system (no geoprocessing, analytics, etc).

They also want the system to be high availability with disaster recovery using a series of virtual machines with flexible resources.

Is this a good use-case for just doing a single-machine deployment in production? I feel that this would limit bandwidth usage between HA machines and improve performance. The only "downside" is that you can't scale out--but I can always add storage, and I can't imagine them burning through all available cores with a handful of active story maps.

From Esri's documentation:

The [single-machine] deployment scenario described below is straightforward to set up, maintain, and upgrade. It can support a sandbox environment for development and testing, but it is also a valid (and in some cases ideal) configuration for some production environments.

[ChrisSmith7 · Accepted solution]

Sounds like a single-machine active-passive set-up would work well for your case. I've had experience with this architecture with more users and it worked well, even with some low-key geoprocessing.

Esri should be able to supply a no-cost license for the passive failover, but keep in mind, if you want to go with an active-active set-up, you'll have to buy another license, or split your cores (for your current license).