Latest Contributions by PaulDavidson1

Dan: Is 2 servers per cluster now considered best practice?  In which case why bother with the cluster and instead create lots of individual sites. But then don't we loss out on the concept of letting ArcServer allocate for us? I have been told 2 VMs of 2 cores each is better than 1 with 4 cores (depending on load) Interestingly, this coincides with the software direction Esri started pushing of smaller directed apps vs. the one big do it all map. Tx -Paul ... View more

Many thanks Aaron. That reduces my level of angst! While over-allocating at the Hypervisor level is possible in ESXi: virtualization - How is memory allocated in ESXi server? - Server Fault I would stay as far away from that as I could, especially in an active environment. However, maybe the OPs situation is a good example of where over-allocation makes sense? 1000 map services, most of which are rarely used but need to be available (if I recall, that's the situation.) If you required actual required RAM for each map service (of what? 80-250MB per service) one could be looking at as much as 250 GB needed (or more I suppose) plus CPUs...  All to host services not hit too often. In that case, over-allocation would make sense to me but you'd sure want to monitor usage. One advantage of VMware ESXi that I believe HyperV does not provide is that you can, on the fly, allocate more or reduce RAM and Cores to a virtual box as needed.  Maybe the latest HyperV has started offering this?  I'm not an HyperV guy at all.  (makes me want to try taking a VMware virtual 2012R2 under VM and then HyperV inside that  😉 Sorry you had to experience that too common IT mode.. IT arrogance, like most arrogance, is based on insecurity and fear of ?   Been seeing that for decades, and I'm often in IT... (more IS) I think the conventional wisdom has been that VMware is what you need for large enterprise virtualizations.  It is more robust, but has much higher costs (both $ and overhead) while HyperV has been better for smaller shops with lower needs and smaller budgets? But apparently with win2012R2 srvr, HyperV has come closer to VMware in robustness and is cheaper.  I'm reading articles now that are talking about combining the two.  Especially when you need to save on licensing costs. Personally, I love working in the virtual world from the standpoint of a developer and IT manager. I think in 10 years, we will hardly recognize even our current virtual world. ... View more

Interesting stuff Frank. One thing that gets confusing is talking about virtual memory. Microsoft uses it to indicate Swap space, disk space acting as a place to hold RAM images (I know you know that, just putting it out there for clarification.) So when you say you're up to 5GB of virtual memory, do you mean in your Windows Max Swap space size? Or do you mean in your VMware allocation for the guest OS? When we get into the virtual world where we're virtualizing servers, now virtual memory is something different. It's now memory on the host being set aside for the virtual box's usage. But the virtual box's guest OS, if Windows, is still doing it's own Virtual (swap) ram.... And I think most Hypervisors have their own method of doing Swap space so that if available physical ram is over allocated, swapping starts happening.  In my experience, this causes virtual boxes to start to crawl. So that's sort of a third class of virtual ram. As you said, resource exhaustion is the bane of ArcServer.  (or really, almost any situation) I think in this day and age of cheap ram we should be trying to never have to use Swap space. This can be much easier said than done unless you're lucky enough to have pretty much unlimited resources. I've noticed substantial improvements in my local VM boxes by requiring they not swap out. They allocate and receive their chunk of RAM and run or they don't get fired off. Now this does not address the issue of Windows Virtual memory (swap space) Again, though, if you allocate enough ram to begin with for the guest, then set the swap space to a low min, say 256MB, then you can run and then hope that the 256MB never grows.  This means you're never going to swap space (or if you are it's small chunks < 256mb) and if it does grow, it can give you a good starting point for adding more actual ram (or actual virtual ram for the guest  😉 Besides watching the commit metric, one also wants to watch the Physical Memory % When that number starts hitting >=80% (I think the magic number is 83%? ) Windows starts swapping big time. There's quite a few articles out there on this. Swapping is just bad for performance and all sorts of things.  Especially on a server.  Especially on a heavily loaded ArcServer with a lot of map services, the amount of disk thrashing that can go on can just paralyze a server. I was just Goggling about the 80% number and came to realize that with the new flavors of Windows after XP, things have gotten a LOT more complicated at the OS level.  As the first article states, "Windows memory management is rocket science" Now add virtualization onto to this and .... Here's an older article (2010 ) but worth the read from the perspective of trying to understand Virtual (swap) memory. And the link inside it to Russovich's (of SysInternals fame) 2008 article gets even deeper. Windows 7 memory usage: What's the best way to measure? | ZDNet They make some interesting comments about the Commit metric. ... View more

Well, that’s concerning…  and perplexing given my experience. What sort of issues have you had with VMware? Was this with Workstation or ESXi/Sphere? Was it back with early versions or recent incantations? I've been at two enterprise shops that have gone VMware w. NetApp and we've had great success and very few issues. We've taken a number of serious enterprise servers into the virtual world with maybe an afternoon of downtime. Run a virtual converter and publish the box and we're done. Since  I'm in the  process of designing a new 10.3 server farm this thread is quite pertinent and I appreciate your responses. ... View more

Are you using VMware?  I know in VMware Workstation, (Edit:Preferences (before firing off any VM box)) there is a setting that tells the VM boxes to:  Fit all virtual machine memory into reserved host RAM, Allow some... to swap ., Allow most... to swap I assume the VMware ESXi  has a similar setting.  And can ask our systems guys if needed. It's been shown that in virtual boxes, swapping into virtual space is quite slow and degrades performance. Locking them into actual RAM is noticeably faster.  Of course, in your case, that is probably not a good idea because your locking RAM away that could rarely be used. . As is the file system you are using.  e.g. Don't use shared folders, the ones you access via VMware tools. Dog slow... only use to transfer between guest and host.  I'd doubt any are in use in an ESXi sphere. I think this is more related to local development VMware Workstation boxes. We have a server with ~220 services and it has always been problematic, runs right on the edge with 24GB of RAM.  I've put it onto a standard reboot service due to memory leaks in javaw and the pkill process. I inherited this and I'm looking for ways to drop the # of services.  I was hoping to go to 0 instances, but now I'm gun shy. You might find the following worth a read: Comparing Filesystem Performance in Virtual Machines I hope you continue to post your findings and solutions. Overcoming your issues with such a huge installation will really help those of us with less complicated but not trivial setups 😉 ... View more

Did not AGOL receive FISMA certification in summer 2014? It was announced at UC, at least that's what I recall. Doesn't fix your ATO and other issues however. I also wonder about 1000 services. That is huge.  Of course, so is the area the BLM covers... Especially if these are static, it would seem you could put multiple layers onto one mxd and publish like that. In fact, since they're static, you never have to touch the mxds again, once the deliverable (an mxd?) is received. It sounds like your end users are basically demanding one service per layer? I have learned one thing about being the IT side of the GIS equation. Sometimes the end users don't understand the tech difficulties and have to be flexible with their work flows.... Sometimes IT has to say, it can't be done that way but we can do it this way.... Or, we can do it like that but the time and cost is X and doing it this other way costs Y and X >10Y That is something management usually pays attention to. Publishing a rarely used, single static layer in a map service just seems like a huge waste of resources. I am quite curious to know if 10.3 fixes the 0 instance errors. ... View more

Thanks Larry That worked I'll try digesting this info and go from there. ... View more

Thanks for the info Larry. I could get the Config Documentation but not the Viewer App ... View more

I believe I added a reply regarding the install of this widget in WAB 1.1 but it hasn't posted yet. I might have killed the reply before I submitted it.... To add to it, line 433 has gone to line 450 var url = this.originOperLayer.url + '/' + subId; and line 406 to 423 var url = this.originOperLayer.url + '/layers'; Fortunately, I only found them once in the file so that was an easy swap. ... View more

Robert: I have a very similar issue to Steven. I'm surprised more folks don't.... Our data is confidential and needs to remain behind our firewalls. I have added our REST endpoints as map layers to my content. And created an AGOL webmap that displays the data fine. I've shared it with certain internal groups and with the organization as a whole. The data is not running on a secure server because it was not setup that way originally (I've inherited the setups....)  ArcServer 10.1 The web map works fine. No identity login needed because it's open in our intranet. When I pull the webmap into WAB, like Steven, I only see the AGOL basemap.  The Layer List is empty. This must have something to do with the firewall setup and WAB not understanding that it's inside the firewall with permission. For example, when I work from home, if I pull up the webmap and forget to VPN in first, I see nothing on the map but the AGOL layers, like in WAB here at work.  But when I VPN in, then the layers appear. Which of course is exactly what I expect I guess I should try running this from home via VPN and see if that somehow fools it into working... I am currently working on getting the LocalLayer widget working.... ... View more

Adam: I'm trying to follow your instructions and give this a shot with my local WAB install. I installed the new WAB 1.1 However, when I follow your instructions to get the LL widget running, I find that the folder and json file: ....\client\builder\predefined-apps\default2DApp\config.json do not exist. I have ....\client\builder but no predefined-apps folder and so of course no default2DApp folder. I did find: C:\arcgis-web-appbuilder-1.1\client\stemapp\predefined-apps\default and will proceed to modify the config.json found there. I see by that release 1.0 has the folder structure ....\client\builder\predefined-apps\default2DApp so this is a change with the new release. unfortunately, I find 62 copies of config.json under the root WAB folder so .... Thank for an update ... View more

Larry: I'm trying to duplicate a web app similar to yours where our data is hosted inside our firewalls but available to named AGOL users in our organization only.  Field users with iPads have to VPN inside the firewall to get at the data. Maybe that's my issue.  I have added a number of map services to My Content via the REST endpoints, no problem. Our local intranet map servers are not using any security, just http://ourservername:6080/etc.... But you can only see those from inside the firewall. Our ArcServers are running 10.1 SP1 (Funny, I can't find any Requirements page for Web AppBuilder) I can make an AGOL webmap with the map layers no problem. But when I start up a local registered copy of WAB from inside the firewall, the only layer that displays is the AGOL basemap.  The Layer list widget shows nothing. Similarily if I create an AGOL webmap with one of our layers as the basemap, then I pull up nothing. I've googled this and dug everywhere, I can't believe I'm the only with this issue but I've found basically nothing to help.  There is a post on Rebecca's blog that might have some info about turning ArcServer to https but it's not applicable to 10.1. Any suggestions?  Do I need to turn on Oauth2 in AGOL? Thanks for any help.  (I'm also installing the LocalLayer widget and see how that goes, except my WAB install doesn't match the folder structure given...) ... View more

Update:  adding a Network\Admin path to the ORACLE_HOME path (C:\app\pdavidson\product\11.2.0\client_1 in my installation)  of the instant client install and then putting a TNSNAMES.ORA file into that folder allowed me to get rid of the full admin clients from the path. More testing underway, such as uninstalling the full admin clients, etc....  I strongly suspect how one setups one's environment depends entirely on how you are connecting to Oracle.  I am not an oracle dba.  Our setups seem to have always used TNSnames.ora files. I have not tried ArcPRO to connect to Oracle yet either. ... View more

George: one question Is it a correct assumption that ArcPRO will need the 64bit client? I too had the problems listed above but my issue seems a bit different. I had installed the instant client (unaware of this thread) and could connect to oracle and see what were our SDE databases but when i tried to do any preview in ArcCatalog I would pull errors.  Don't recall exact errors, sorry. Since we have had problems in the past with the instant client, I did the full install of 32 bit then 64 bit. We also had an Oracle employee on site a couple of weeks back and he said he always does the full install, just without the database installation.  Apparently instant client is not always so instant or reliable? But after installing the two full clients I then had the ORA-01455 error.  But 64 bit was first in path at that time. I moved my paths around to have 32 bit instant client, 32 bit admin client, 64 bit admin client at front of path and now ArcCatalog seems to be working fine.  I did have to create the TNSNames.ora files for both 32 and 64 bit full installs. This is all on a VMWare box I'm building for testing. Doing some testing with the PATH:      Removing the 32 bit instant client from the path == ORA-01455 error occurs.      Adding 32 bit instant client back to path and removing the two full admin clients from the path == Oracle connections happen ok and this time, Previews are working.  Note, there is no TNSNAMES file in my instant client (no idea where to put that file in that install)      However, when I went to preview a large road network, ArcCatalog crashed with a fault in ntdll.dll, exception code C0000005      I added the full clients back into the path, connected ok and when I previewed the large road network, it showed the geometry and table just fine.  Just to verify, I again pulled the full clients out of the PATH and verified it crashes ArcCatalog.  This time the crash was different, the esri equivalent of a BSOD, then serious app error where I email info to Esri.      Putting the full admins back into the path, AFTER, the instant client and these test at least works again.           NOTE: this is not very heavy usage of ArcCatalog and doesn't at all make me warm and fuzzy about deploying this in production anywhere in our organization.  I will wait for 10.3.1 before offering it to our users.      Which leads me to conclude, I need both instant client and full admin client installed for ArcCatalog to work properly.  I should try a full install and install the full 11.2.0.1.0 client to see if that makes any difference. I do note that my admin clients are 11.1.0 but instant client is 11.2.0 which matches our Oracle servers (11.2.0.1.0 actually) ... View more