Questions Surrounding Webgisdr, Hosts Files, and Enterprise Migration in a Distributed Environment

[EdwardBuckley]

Hello all,

My org is currently in the process of migrating our production Enterprise servers from on-prem to the cloud. We have a distributed environment comprised of 5 servers: (1) Web Adapter/IIS, (2) Portal/Server, (3) Data Store, (4) GeoEvent, (5) Workflow.

Our URLs will stay the same, but ALL the server hostnames will change. We followed the steps laid out in this Blog post: Migrate to a new machine in ArcGIS Enterprise using the WebGIS DR tool. We edited the hosts files on all 5 cloud servers to redirect the URL from on-prem to the cloud's Web Adapter.

However, when we ran the webgisdr Restore in the cloud, it broke our on-prem Data Store and caused an unrecoverable failure. We ended up having to restore that server from a snapshot to get it working again. 

Looking at the webgisdr config during execution, all of the servers reference the URL with the exception of Data Store, it references it's FQDN. Which is fine if you're restoring Data Store to the same hostname, but a major issue when restoring to a different hostname. While I can't be 100% certain this was the cause of our on-prem Data Store failure, but the timing was awfully coincidental for it not to be.

Which brings me here, I obviously need to add more entries into the hosts file of the cloud servers and my question is this: What additional entries do I need? Im guessing I just need to add this:

cloud data store IP           on-prem data store FQDN

I am incredibly worried about running the webgisdr restore in the cloud without all of the necessary entries as I dont want to break on-prem.....again!

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

[TraeTimmerman · Accepted solution]

Hey @EdwardBuckley,

You should only need to specify hostfile entries on the cloud servers so they are able to resolve the DNS that is used in your on-prem deployment to the appropriate place (likely the web adaptor host). Webgisdr does not require machine names remain the same for any components, including ArcGIS Data Store.

Regarding the issue with your on-prem data store. Restoring a webgisdr backup in a different data center (i.e. the cloud) should have no impact on your on-prem deployment.

Hope this helps. 

[EdwardBuckley]

That is what we initially did, just the 1 host file entry resolving the URL to the cloud Web Adapter. Unfortunately, the cloud restore failed at Data Store. The specific error message from the log reads " Failed to restore the Relational Data Store: \nUrl: https://on-premDataStoreFQDN.org.com:2443/arcgis. Connect to ON-PREMDATASTOREFQDN.ORG.COM:2443 [ON-PREMDATASTOREFQDN.ORG.COM/on-prem Data Store IP] failed: Connection refused: "

While the documentation says I just need the single host file entry, the logs reflect differently.

[EdwardBuckley]

Update: We were able to successfully import the webgisdr without any additional host file entries. Only extra step we took was to completely shut down the On-Prem servers to prevent a rerun of last time. I don't know if it was necessary or not, but it's what we did.

I am going to assume that in our previous unsuccessful attempt, we forgot to update the host file on one of the cloud servers.