Essentials Install Location with ArcGIS 10.1
I am currently preparing an environment for ArcGIS Server 10.1 and I wanted to see how people are migrating their Geocortex installs. My environment will be a multi sever cluster using the web adaptor with IIS on our both internal and external web servers. What I am curious to find out is where the essentials install should be located. I am thinking it should be on the web server that has the web adapter installed. Anyone who can share their experinces with this process would be exteremely helpful.
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Nick,
perfect timing... we are just going through the same stage. We had our local GXE distributor in yesterday assessing the situation, and had Esri Oz in the week before with their suggestions re: AGS so we feel, as a collective, we've come up with an architecture that will suit our needs of high capacity and high availability with some elasticity built in.
Essentially we have an NLB (Netscaler) feeding traffic to 2 GXE servers (at this stage) - and we've piggy backed the Web Adaptor onto these, so we are also using AD authentication at the Web Tier, not the ArcGIS Server tier - to avoid any use of tokens if possible!
We have two main sites in our current production environment that consume up to 8 AGS boxes (with the GXE REST install on each of these) on bad fire days, so we've decided to separate these up into their own VM cluster. Each cluster will start with at least 4 AGS servers in each AGS 'site' as they also call it now, and then internally clustered for mapping (4 servers) and Geoprocessing tasks (one extra server for this is proposed). Both AGS and GXE configs are stored on a network file share for HA, and both clusters will be reading from replicated SQL Server 2012, although we are now concerned that esri level components will not support the read-only database structure proposed, so we will be more than likely avoiding any doubts by using fGDB replication across to our lighter-weight Overview site/cluster as we do not really need to tap into a fully fledged enterprise GDB. So the diagram attached is a little out of date at the database level....
If you have any questions, feel free to PM me and or keep this thread ticking, as I'm also keen on seeing what people are doing also.... I'm finding 10.1 a major pain at present to learn all the nuances of what's new, and supposedly 'better', and I'm still to get our GP tasks across into this new environment for testing which is due very shortly!
I'll keep you posted on our testing results and how things are going in general. Fingers crossed we can get it all done before start of fire season.. which is fast approaching : (
hope it helps
GF
/customer/servlet/servlet.FileDownload?file=00P6000000e88QTEAY0 -
Thanks for posting the diagram. I think my proposed setup is very similar minus the load balancer and file share. I will most likely use one of our GIS servers to store the config since I don't really have a file share server that would be feasible for this. I have one question about your environment are you acessing your manager for geocortex on your web servers and your file server hosts your application services for geocortex.
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I will also post my diagram as well once I have it complete.
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Just remember with your architectures, the Client browser must be able to hit the REST endpoint for ArcGIS Server. The web adaptor for ArcGIS Server can this role as a "proxy" so ArcGIS Server and Essentials share the same server to handle requests from the client Viewer.
For security, I usually have application-level passwords on map services (so the communication between Essentials and ArcGIS Server are secured), but not consumable by other applications without knowing the password. If not SSL/HTTPS, the token supplied to the client could be intercepted and used in a separate application, making the security really just a deterrent.
Further, with security enabled, tokens will be required to execute workflow activities as the activities will connect directly to the map services.
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I have one question about your environment are you acessing your manager for geocortex on your web servers and your file server hosts your application services for geocortex.
Nick,
We have the full install of GXE on the 2 'application servers' that are piggy-backed with the WebAdaptor, so the GE app server and REST API are on these two. The file share server only hosts the site directory, so the site.xml, viewer.xml, workflows etc, are read from this network share which is HA.
does that make sense? We've pointed the GXE application servers to point at this one file share location. I run either of the two managers I have available and the changes appear in each, which is nice!
cheers
GF
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Garreth, I just thought holy cow when I read your description.
We're keeping our internal system and external system seperate and will most likely head to the cloud with arcgis.com for the public.
We have Essentials on it's own server with two ags with two web servers and load balancer in front. Are you running two Essentials primarily for fall back or performance?
I'm finding our limiting factor has been the pipes through the load balancers/firewalls.
Are you running many services? Do you tile cache layers like admin boundaries? - now I'm straying into ArcGIS Server maintenance.
BUT
Have you got Optimizer running? I'm having a little trouble with 1.6 and the set up with 10.1.
Is anyone from OZ out there thinking about the AAM/Geocortex workshop before Ozri in Sept in Brisbane?
Oh and I've got a bad feeling I'm going to need some things that are appearing in 10.2 - so another migration sooner rather than later.
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Peter,
At present we don't have an external 'public' system - it pains me to think of how we handle 70,000 CFA volunteers tapping into the system on the bad days! So, we only work with an 'internal' system as such that you have to have a valid network login, even if you are off network. I dare say we'll look at cloud based 'viewers' for the general public and CFA vols, but long way to go before that one is settled! Long story ; )
The two GE boxes are - as you say, for both performance balancing, as the NLB sits on top of this, and fall-back. We will get to testing this shortly - I'm hoping to get AAM back in to do some serious stress testing to break it. They've helped me this week to configure the environment and so far so good.
We have about 20 Map services hosted by us, but also consume a number of CFA hosted services - many of these we make available through the add map layers function.
As for optimizer - yep! getting to that eventually! will like this setup and running for testing purposes, so will let you know how I get on with the 10.1 setup.
I won't be heading to Ozri, therefore also not the AAM workshop, which is a pity, but too much to do in too little time down here!
We plan to see what's in 10.2 that will REALLY benefit us. The learning curve with 10.1 is steep, so just want to bed down this setup for the coming fire season first, and potentially update to 10.2 when things quieten down - or stay quiet - touch wood!
cheers
GF
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I get how your essentials is setup now thanks for the feedback it seems more efficent to me to setup it up how you have it with your site config files on a file server. I think I will most likely setup mine that way as well. It will be nice to manage just one set of config files. Right now I am mangaging two seperate application servers with different config files so this will be nice having it all in place.
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Nick,
sounds good from my point of view - I have someone else to bounce issues off also ; )
cheers
GF
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The Town of Oakville recently setup a high-availability GXE solution using a ArcGIS Server 10.1 cluster. They have a simpler architecture, but matches what was done here pretty closely otherwise.
- 1 NLB
- 2 GXE servers, complete install with a shared network SITES folder between the two. ArcGIS Server 10.1 Web Adaptor also installed.
- 3 ArcGIS Server 10.1 systems in a cluster. Map service secured using a single AD user.
Thanks,
Shawn
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