Hot / Cold Sync of Portal

[ZachChristoff]

Has anyone setup Portal in a hot / cold environment? I'm looking for any best practices or pro tips on syncing Portals. I'm hoping to perform weekly pushes of data from our hot side to our cold side, but haven't a clue on what is involved.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[AbhishekTandon]

We also have Portal running in a active / passive setup. The key for us was making sure we removed all instances of "machine name" from the Portal config. Our setup is also federated, which required a deep tweak (FQN rewrite) within Portal to make it happen. We use RoboCopy to copy deltas from active / passive nightly.

As for Server, we haven't had any luck in getting it to work on our passive side yet. We have ESRI Professional Services looking into a sustainable solution for this.

Hi Zach,

I did some reverse study on architecture of Portal. I am trying to find an answer, "Is it really possible to run Portal on A-A (Active - Active) mode?". It seems to me that at a time only one Portal Server can read repository (File based and DB Based - Postgres) and other will always be passive (like failover Swing) with some communication setup between 2 portal app servers.

As you are working with ESRI Professional service team, can you get it answered? I asked ESRI but they did not answer to me without professional service and we would like to engage them only if we know that things can be solved.

Thanks,
Abhishek Tandon

[TrevorHart2]

Just a word of caution that we've found that in order to be 100% reliable we have to shut down the Portal service (and hence postgres) before we copy the Portal database folder to our cold site. If we don't do this we sometimes end up with invalid check points and Postgres fails to start up. I say "sometimes" as we have been successful in most cases with Portal still running but every other start up will fail on the DR site unless Portal is shut down.

The error messages we see in the Event viewer (when we dont shut down Portal) are;

• LOG: database system was shut down at 2014-09-09 23:00:02 NZST
• LOG: unexpected pageaddr 0/3000000 in log file 0, segment 5, offset 0
• LOG: invalid primary checkpoint record
• LOG: invalid secondary checkpoint record
• PANIC: could not locate a valid checkpoint record
• LOG: startup process (PID 3372) exited with exit code 3
• LOG: aborting startup due to startup process failure

[TrevorHart2]

Abhishek

At 10.2.x this isn't really possible OOTB. You need Esri professional services help to implement and to get some custom build libraries for Portal (the OOTB libraries dont support it).

At 10.3 there are instructions to do this yourself.

Trevor

[LeeGraham]

I have been using portalpy to sync content from our DEV/TEST to PROD and DR.