Correct AdminURL for a ArcGIS Server Site with two machines and a single portal, all 11.1

[hesmebye]

I wonder what the correct AdminURL setup is for a two AGS site with one single portal when we are using a internal load balancer.

The service / external access to the site is throug a WA installed on a single machine, so the webcontext will typically be https://domain.geodata.no/portal and https://domain.geodata.no/agshost and https://domain.geodata.no/maps

The /maps conext points to the site with two arcgis servers.

We also have an internal load balanser implemented by IIS that points to mapserver1.local.no:6443/arcgis and mapserver2.local.no:6443/arcgis  - the url to the loadbalanser is on the form  lb.local.no:6443/arcgis

In portal we are setting the admin url to the servers site to this internal loadbalanser  https://lb.local.no:6443/arcgis According to the documentation this seems correct.

What is more unclear to me is - should we keep the adminurl in for the machine found under arcgis server admin -  /arcgis/admin/machines/mapserver1.local.no as https://mapserver1.local.no:6443/arcgis (and mapserver2 for the second machine)
or should we point it to https://lb.local.no:6443/arcgis ?  

We are currently using https://mapserver1.local.no:6443/arcgis

Thanks in advance!

[CodyPatterson]

Hey @hesmebye 

I have a similar setup to yours, hopefully I can provide some insight!

We have a Server, Notebook Server, Workflow Manager, Portal, and Datastore all on separate servers, with Webadaptors on those servers through Windows IIS. We also have a load balancer setup that acts as a reverse proxy, we setup the servers to have a WebContext URL as the load balancer's URL, in that case, we federated the servers with the load balancer URL, here are some example pictures if it helps:

I would personally use the loadbalancer URL for most if not all as it keeps everything consistent.

Hope that helps!

Cody

[BillFox]

it should be set to survive if one of the ArcGIS Server machines is dead or offline for scheduled maintenance

[TimoT · Accepted solution]

The below Esri document has good information about administration URLs in various highly available scenarios

• Highly available ArcGIS Enterprise deployment scenarios—Portal for ArcGIS | Documentation for ArcGIS...

You can think of the Administration URL as the URL that Portal will use to communicate to your ArcGIS Servers in any given server site. If you have more than one machine in the site, you should make sure it is a highly available URL (as you have already done with your internal LB URL).

As for your other server sites that only consist of one machine, it's fine to set the URL either to the LB or direct to machine until you increase the number of machines in these server sites. There are a few considerations to each approach. One of them would be regarding SSL certificates:

• If admin URL is to your LB, Portal will be working with your LB's IIS server certificate during inter-communication
• If admin URL is to your server machine, Portal will be working with Server's underlying tomcat SSL certificate during inter-communication

Timo

[hesmebye]

Thanks for all replies.
I will continue to use the internal LB as the the admin url for the mapservers site speficied in the portal and not touch the admin url for each map server spesified under /arcgis/admin/machines/ in the server admin.

-helge