ArcGIS Notebook Server 10.9 on RHEL 8?

[Justin_Greco]

We are looking at installing ArcGIS Notebook Server 10.9 on RHEL.  The system requirements only show RHEL 7 Update 8.  All other 10.9 software (Server, Portal) support RHEL 7 Update 9 and RHEL 8.  Our server admins would prefer provisioning a RHEL 8 server.  Has anyone tried Notebook Server on RHEL 8?

[RaviNarayanan]

hi @Justin_Greco ,

Thank you for this post. We have tested ArcGIS Notebook Server 10.9 with RHEL 8.3 and plan to update the web help to indicate support for this platform in 10.9. 

https://enterprise.arcgis.com/en/notebook/latest/install/linux/welcome-to-the-arcgis-notebook-server...

If you are interested in installing Notebook Server 10.9 on RHEL 8, you can follow the current install guide. As a prerequisite, you will have to install Mirantis Container Runtime (MCR, formerly Docker EE). 

Please let us know if there are any questions. 

[Justin_Greco]

We are starting to plan our upgrade to 10.9.1 from 10.8.0 and have been planning to include ArcGIS Notebook Server as part of our environment.  Like I mentioned we are on RHEL 8, but I just discovered that to use MCR in production, we would need to get a license.  However, the cost is rather steep, would be $10k per year to get a license.  Are there any other options other than MCR for RHEL?  If not, would you recommend considering Windows instead?  I know Ubuntu can use Docker Community, but we only are supported to use RHEL or Windows.

[RaviNarayanan · Accepted solution]

Hi Justin,

Thanks for this question. At this time MCR is the only option that is available for RHEL 8.  Considering the cost for a basic MCR license ($500 per node and minimum 20 nodes at this time), the other choice for you would be Windows (plus Docker Desktop on Windows), if Ubuntu is not an option. You can have a mixed OS configuration with ArcGIS Enterprise on Linux, and just the notebook server installed on Windows. 

Just to know, would any other Linux OS currently supported by ArcGIS Enterprise (may not be supported in Notebook Server) work for your organization?

[Justin_Greco]

Thanks for the quick response Ravi.  The only operating systems that our infrastructure team will support are RHEL and Windows.  Are there any downsides with running Notebook Server on Windows?  While working with someone from Esri during our 10.8 upgrade a few years ago, they indicated that Linux was preferred at the time due to Docker support.  I don't see any issues with us getting a Windows server to use for this in production.  

[RaviNarayanan]

Yes, there are some considerations when using Notebook Server with Docker Desktop on Windows. Please see "Prerequisites and constraints for Windows systems"  section of this help topic. Primarily, there are three considerations: Hyper-V needs to be enabled on windows, DFS requirements for multi-node notebook server sites, and Docker Desktop requirement of user being logged into the machine. 

[Justin_Greco]

I reached out to our system admins and they responded asking if Notebook Server supports VMware Integrated Containers.  Doesn't look like it from the documentation, but thought I would ask.

[usspacenut]

Hi Ravi,

Is there a plan for supporting OCI compliant container runtimes?  What would the timeline be for something like that?

[RaviNarayanan]

Hi @usspacenut can you provide more details on what specifically you are looking to be supported? 

[usspacenut]

Well Docker is really just a wrapper around some tools that create native containers on Linux so it seems silly to be locked-in to their ecosystem when native tools are often supported and maintained to the Open Container Initiative standards - there's a reason Docker lost when it comes to Kubernetes - they make their own changes and go off in to lala land trying to lock you in to their ecosystem.  I'd much prefer open tooling like podman, skopeo, and buildah if I have to work with containers since they can run on any *nix OS natively - it even works great in WSL2 but more importantly, if you can create and spin up the container with buildah and podman you can spin it up with any OCI compliant runtimes (including Docker, though the reverse can sometimes not be true).