You can replicate your ArcGIS Enterprise deployment to a disconnected standby deployment. The standby deployment can be brought online and made your active deployment if your primary deployment fails.
Because the standby deployment is not actively connected to your primary deployment, you can set up the standby deployment in another building or city to guard against downtime due to such occurrences as localized natural disasters or power outages. Keep in mind, though, that the standby deployment must be accessible from your clients.
Export the components of your primary ArcGIS Enterprise deployment to a compressed file using the WebGISDR tool, and use the compressed file to set up and maintain the standby deployment.
Before you configure disaster recovery, be sure you read Disaster recovery and replication.
Export ArcGIS Enterprise
Use the WebGISDR tool with the export operation and a properties file to export your primary ArcGIS Enterprise deployment. To understand what's included in the exported file, see ArcGIS Enterprise backups. The file size and time it takes to create it vary depending on how many items are in your organization, the number and type of hosted web layers you have, how many federated servers you have, and how many ArcGIS Server machines are in your hosting and federated servers.
The WebGISDR tool is installed to <Portal for ArcGIS installation directory>/tools/webgisdr. To ensure that you meet the criteria for using the tool, see Create an ArcGIS Enterprise backup.
Follow these steps to export your primary ArcGIS Enterprise deployment:
- Make a copy of the template properties file. You can save the copy in the same directory as the template or to a new directory.
The template properties file—webgisdr.properties—is installed in /arcgis/portal/tools/webgisdr by default.
- Open the copy of the properties file and edit it to include information specific to your site. See WebGISDR tool properties file for more information.
- Save the properties file.
The PORTAL_ADMIN_PASSWORD value will be encrypted in the file and PORTAL_ADMIN_PASSWORD_ENCRYPTED is set to true once you run the WebGISDR tool with this file.
- Open a command shell, change directories to the location of the WebGISDR tool, and run the tool with the export option.
In this example, the properties file (mywebgis.properties) was saved in the user-created directory /home/ags/arcgis/portal/propfiles.
webgisdr --export --file /home/ags/arcgis/portal/propfiles/mywebgis.properties - You can also add a second command, such as a validation script, to run after the WebGISDR tool completes. For example:
> call webgisdr.bat -i -f webgisdr.properties > IF %ERRORLEVEL% EQU 0 <your validation script file>
When the backup completes, the file is created relative to the value set for the BACKUP_STORE_PROVIDER. If you set the BACKUP_STORE_PROVIDER to FileSystem, the backup resides in the location you specified for the BACKUP_LOCATION in the properties file. If you set the BACKUP_STORE_PROVIDER to AmazonS3 or AzureBlob, it is copied to the respective cloud storage location.
The name of the file is <timestamp>.webgissite.
Move the export file
If the export file was created in a location that the standby deployment cannot access, move the backup file to a location that the WebGISDR tool can access. Make a copy of the properties file specifically to be used for importing, and update the BACKUP_LOCATION value in the new properties file to reflect the new location of the export file. If the BACKUP_LOCATION is directory, the tool will extract the latest backup within the directory into the SHARED_LOCATION. If the BACKUP_LOCATION is set to a specific backup file, the tool will extract that backup into the SHARED_LOCATION.
Ensure the machines in the standby deployment can access the SHARED_LOCATION path.
Ensure that the account that runs the webgisdr tool has at least read access to the BACKUP_LOCATION and write access to the SHARED_LOCATION. Also be sure that the account that installed ArcGIS Server, Portal for ArcGIS, and ArcGIS Data Store has read access to the SHARED_LOCATION.
For the purposes of this workflow example, the copy of the properties file is named toimport.properties.
Install components for standby deployment
Before you import the ArcGIS Enterprise deployment to the standby for the first time, you need to install and configure all software components (ArcGIS Server, Portal for ArcGIS, ArcGIS Web Adaptor, and ArcGIS Data Store) on the standby machines. The URL used to access the portal (either the load balancer URL or web adaptor URL) and the ArcGIS Server services URL must be the same for the standby deployment as they are for your primary deployment.
For example, if the URL to access the portal on the primary deployment is https://myportalslb.organization.com/portal and the services URL for the GIS Server on the primary deployment is https://myserverslb.organization.com/server, the standby deployment must use the same URLs.
Additional ArcGIS licenses are not required for the standby deployment because it is not actively accessed; you only make it the active deployment if the primary fails.
Import to standby deployment
Once you have an empty deployment on the standby machines, import the content from your primary deployment.
If your primary ArcGIS Enterprise deployment is highly available, the WebGISDR tool maintains high-availability settings for the GIS Server site and the ArcGIS Data Store object and relational data stores when you import to the standby deployment. For the portal, the WebGISDR tool unregisters the standby portal machine, restores the portal to the primary machine, and reregisters the standby machine when imported.
- Open a command shell on the Portal for ArcGIS machine of the standby deployment, change directories to the location of the WebGISDR tool, and run the tool with the import option.
In this example, the properties file (toimport.properties) was saved in the user-created directory /home/ags/arcgis/portal/propfiles.
webgisdr --import --file /home/ags/arcgis/portal/propfiles/toimport.propertiesNote that the property file does not have to be in the same directory you saved it in when first created. If you do move it, specify the new directory location with the --file parameter.
Maintain standby deployment
To minimize data loss, export from the primary and import to the standby deployment as frequently as possible. How often you can do this depends on how long it takes to export and import your deployment, and whether you can script the export and import processes without the need for manual intervention (for example, you may need to physically copy files from one location to another).
Switch to standby when primary fails
As discussed in Disaster recovery and replication, your IT department can bring the standby deployment online if your primary deployment fails.