HA ArcGIS Portal upgrade from 10.0.1 to 11.3

[AnthonyGreenhalgh2]

we recently moved to arcgis enterprise v11.3 and are trying to join the failover arcgis portal server to the primary one. we have run into a problem where we get an error message stating "There was an error when attempting to join the existing portal. Failed to create the folder \\xyzxy\d$\configStore\arcgisportal\content.

We have a network dfs fileshare location and the server are in HA Active/Active although the postgress db is Active/Passive.

We have checked security, file permissions, sharing, firewalls, service accounts and we still cannot do a join. would there be anything preventin gour 01r server (failover) from joining our Primary server 01B?

[Scott_Tansley]

hey, i wouldn't normally expect to see a D$ in a UNC path like this, maybe as an admin moving around machines as a quick hack, but you should declare the file path as \\host.domain.com\arcgisportal\content or similar and ensure the permissions are correct on that level for the Portal Windows Service

[AnthonyGreenhalgh2]

Hi Scott, thanks for replying. (its version 10.9.1 to v11.3 btw I mistyped). we are trying to host the portal content on a dfs fileshare. this does not appear to work. we then tried "Sharing" the d drive arcgisportal\content on the Primary server and perform a join and that was unsuccessful too. for some reason failover does not attach to primary... got me baffled!!

[Scott_Tansley]

did HA work at 10.9.1?  Have you upgraded to 11.3 and then decided to go HA?  Sorry, it's not clear.

[AnthonyGreenhalgh2]

sorry... 10.9.1 HA worked. we upgraded to 11.3 in our non-production environment and Portal sites joined.  In our Production domain the Portal Sites do not join. we initially thought there was some additional security hardening but apart from Windows defender this was turned off.  it appears it cannot create folder in arcgis portal/content

[Scott_Tansley]

My imagination is that it shouldn't need to create a folder, it should already be there, especially if you're upgrading.  Did the UNC path with the D$ work before?  Has that changed.  From the information you've given that's the only thing that stands out, but if it's part of the DFS (which I haven't used to date) then carry on.  

So the way that this would normally work is that you would deploy the first portal, and have the D:\arcgisportal folder.  The content and the database and all the configs would be in there.  In preparation for the second portal, you would copy the content to a 'remote location' like a NAS.  Then update the portal to reference the content from there.  

There is no point sharing the data from the 😧 of the first machine.  If it goes down then you've just broken HA.

When you join the second portal, it will create its own D:\arcgisportal folder and have local configs and a local PostgreSQL instance which is your failover node.  For content it would reference the NAS.

Assuming that DFS is supported (I haven't checked) then I can see it working on the 'content' but not the D:\arcgisportal level.  I cannot imagine for one minute that PostgreSQL would be happy to participate in a DFS type arrangement.  They are separate entities with syncing between them.

If you've created the DFS at the D:\arcgisportal level, then that could be the case, but I do not understand why it would have worked at 10.9.1 and not 11.3.

[Scott_Tansley]

`So for ArcGIS Server the use of DFS is not supported:  

https://enterprise.arcgis.com/en/server/latest/install/windows/choosing-a-nas-device.htm#:~:text=and...

I cannot find a reference to DFS for portal, but my gut says it's probably more sensitive than the ArcGIS Server about these things, I can find:

https://enterprise.arcgis.com/en/portal/latest/administer/windows/configuring-a-highly-available-por... 

The only valid options for content store that I've seen are NAS, AWS S3 or Azure Blob:  

https://enterprise.arcgis.com/en/portal/latest/administer/windows/changing-the-portal-content-direct...