Use a command utility to join machines to a site

In most cases, you can use ArcGIS Server Manager or ArcMap to add a machine to your ArcGIS Server site. In the following special circumstances, however, you may need to add machines to an ArcGIS Server site without connecting to the site through a URL of one of the site's machines:

• If the machines in your ArcGIS Server site are overloaded with network requests, attempting to add more ArcGIS Server machines using the URL of the site will not work, as the request will be added to the existing queue of network requests.
• If you want to add a large number of machines to your existing ArcGIS Server site at one time, adding through the URL can be slow because the requests are again queued up to the site. This results in some machines not being added because the requests time out before the queue is cleared.

  For example, a company might create many virtual machines with ArcGIS Server already installed on them, and they want the machines to join an existing ArcGIS Server site when the machines start.

In these advanced cases, use the join-site utility to add a machine to an ArcGIS Server site by specifying the location of the configuration store of the existing site rather than the URL.

The join-site utility is installed in \tools\JoinSite under the ArcGIS Server installation directory. Run the join-site utility from the ArcGIS Server machine you want to add to an existing site.

1. Grant read and write access on the configuration store folder of the existing site to the network account used to run the ArcGIS Server service on the machine or machines you want to join to the site.
2. Create a JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) file named connection.json.
3. Add the following line to the file, replacing <path to the configuration store> with the configuration store location of the existing ArcGIS Server site:

   {"type": "FILESYSTEM", "connectionString": "<path to the configuration store>"}

   If you have a single cluster and did not create your own cluster for the ArcGIS Server site, specify default with the -c option. If your ArcGIS Server site contains multiple clusters or you configured a custom cluster, specify the name of the cluster to which you want to join this machine.

   In this example, the path to the configuration store of the existing site is \\\\myshare\\arcgisserver\\config-store:

   {"type": "FILESYSTEM", "connectionString": "\\\\myshare\\arcgisserver\\config-store"}

4. Save and close the connection.json file.
5. Place the connection.json file on the machine that will join the site or on a shared directory that you can access from the machine that will join the site.
6. Open a command prompt and run join-site.
   The syntax is as follows:

   join-site -f <The file path to the configuration store JSON file> -c <The name of the ArcGIS Server cluster>

   In this example, the path to the configuration store JSON file (connection.json) is C:\serverfiles and the site is a single cluster.

   join-site -f "C:\serverfiles\connection.json" -c default