Upgrade large HA installation from 10.9.1 to 11.1

[mody_buchbinder]

Hi all

We have a large HA installation of Enterprise 10.9.1.

Total of 8 servers: 2 Portal, 2 servers, 2 datastore and 2 image servers.

The system directories are on network drive and all the machines works together.

Most data (maybe all) is in external Enterprise geodatabase and published by reference.

We would like to upgrade to 11.1 with minimum down time.

We are thinking about build a temporary installation of 10.9.1, move all data and let people work on it while we upgrade the original machines.

They will be able to add features to exists layers (because they are by reference) but will not be able to create new items, so the system is limited but not down.

We would like to know if there is a good (and safe) way to do it and how it done in details.

Thanks

[Scott_Tansley]

I think it's important to state that the content you have in the existing platform will use URLs that are not really changeable.  In practice what this means is that you would need to stand up another environment using the same URLs all the way through the stack.  You would need to 'encapsulate' your existing environment into a Virtual Network or similar so that it's only available to the team that is undertaking the upgrade and testing.  

It's quite a lot of work.  So this makes me wonder what your SLAs are to make you invest in this amount of work/complexity?

Can you live without HA for say a weekend?

How many hours can you live without the platform?

Could you look at a weekend upgrade with an associated outage?

If you're the sort of organisation that spans multiple continents, or you have 24/7 business critical operations then it's work exploring the route you describe.  If you're generally using ArcGIS between say 7AM and 7PM, but need HA to minimise risk then it may be overkill as an approach.

[mody_buchbinder]

Hi Scott

Thanks for your response.

To answer your questions, we can live without HA for a weekend but the organization works 24/7 and we have to have minimum downtime (none if possible).

They may live with update features only without creating new portal items for a weekend.

I understand what you offer is to duplicate the machine with the same name/url (what is the way to do it?) then take the duplicated out of the network (so you do not have duplicate names) and upgrade and test it.

Then when it is done, take the original machines out of the network and put the new ones.

Thanks

[Scott_Tansley]

That's probably a question that needs to be addressed to your IT team.  The capabilities that you have from your IaaS/Cloud will determine the best course of action.

The general steps were discussed in this esri blog:

https://www.esri.com/arcgis-blog/products/arcgis-enterprise/administration/minimize-downtime-when-up...

I've given this a quick read, and it generally seems to be the same approach.   Further information here:

https://enterprise.arcgis.com/en/portal/latest/administer/windows/migration-strategies.htm#ESRI_SECT...

[Scott_Tansley]

It's a substantial change, but the usage that you've described would best be met via Kubernetes IMHO:

https://enterprise-k8s.arcgis.com/en/latest/administer/upgrade-to-a-new-version.htm 

It has the model of upgrading that I wish AGE had always had, although that would actually put me out of business!  But it's still the right model subject to you being able to migrate to it and adopt Kubernetes in the first place.  It's a bigger question, but something you should consider given how much work/effort will be involved with each non kubernetes upgrade.

[ArchitSrivastava]

Hello @mody_buchbinder 

I agree with comments from @Scott_Tansley. However, I would not suggest upgrading ArcGIS Enterprise 10.9.1 HA to 11.1 (as of now) as we did this recently for One of our departments (as a test so that we can upgrade other environments) and found that there are several issues with upgrading HA to 11.1 as of now.

Esri logged a BUG for this behavior as well. I don't see that BUG as published yet but you might want to reach out to ESRI Technical support once to confirm prior to making any moves forward as it would take some good amount of work to roll back if you go ahead and failure occurs.

Hope it helps!

[mody_buchbinder]

Hi 

Do you have a bug number?

Thanks

[Scott_Tansley]

https://support.esri.com/en-us/patches-updates/2023/portal-for-arcgis-enterprise-sites-security-patc...

[Scott_Tansley]

https://community.esri.com/t5/arcgis-enterprise-questions/arcgis-enterprise-11-2-upgrade-warning-if-...

[ArchitSrivastava]

Hello @mody_buchbinder ,

Kindly find the BUG details below:

BUG-000160756 : When attempting to upgrade Portal for ArcGIS, the following error is returned, "Index Service configuration failed."

Hope it helps!