Organizations requiring minimal downtime have likely already implemented a disaster recovery or failover strategy. Using tools provided by ArcGIS Enterprise, this could include maintaining a replicated environment, configuring high availability, or a combination of both.
Upgrading can present an additional challenge to reducing downtime. The typical approach for upgrading ArcGIS Enterprise involves upgrading the production environment, a process during which organizations are unavailable. The time it takes to upgrade can be significant if the organization is upgrading from 10.8.1 or 10.9.1, is highly available, or has several federated servers or servers with additional capabilities, such as Image Analysis.
This downtime can be avoided for organizations with an identical, isolated standby environment. As an administrator, you can upgrade your standby environment while your production environment remains accessible, reducing risk and minimizing the time your organization is unavailable. If something unexpected occurs, you can spend time investigating rather than rolling back to the previous version. Once the upgrade is complete and you have performed any necessary quality assurance on the environment, you can send traffic to the standby environment and users can take advantage of the new functionality and features while you upgrade the primary.
Optionally, you could put your production environment in read-only mode, ensuring that your organization remains accessible while also eliminating the risk of managing data differences and the potential of data loss.
If your organization has not implemented a replicated environment, you can set one up by migrating to a new machine or set of machines using the WebGISDR tool.
Highly available and replicated environments require additional steps to upgrade. The following sections outline the steps for each deployment pattern. Before performing the steps in these sections, review the guidance on preparing for an upgrade provided in the following topics and take any relevant steps:
Upgrade an organization configured for high availability
The steps to upgrade the components in your highly available ArcGIS Enterprise deployment are as follows:
- Upgrade your highly available portal.
- Upgrade ArcGIS Web Adaptor (for Portal for ArcGIS) for IIS or Java (Windows).
When specifying the Portal URL, enter the URL of one of the portal machines, for example, https://p1.example.com:7443. This URL will be used to discover both machines in the highly available configuration and to register them with ArcGIS Web Adaptor.
- Upgrade the highly available ArcGIS Server site configured as the hosting server.
- Upgrade ArcGIS Web Adaptor (for ArcGIS Server) for IIS or Java (Windows).
- Upgrade the highly available ArcGIS Data Store.
- If your organization includes additional federated servers, upgrade them.
Most federated servers must match the version of the base ArcGIS Enterprise deployment. For more information about supported versions for federated servers, see Federate a server site.
See the upgrade information for the type of federated servers you need to upgrade:
Upgrade replicated environments
The steps to upgrade the components in your primary and standby environments are as follows:
- Optionally, place the primary environment in read-only mode.
- Upgrade the standby environment:
- Upgrade Portal for ArcGIS. If your organization is configured for high availability, see Upgrade your highly available portal.
- Upgrade ArcGIS Web Adaptor (for Portal for ArcGIS) for IIS or Java (Windows).
If your organization is configured for high availability, enter the URL of one of the portal machines when specifying the Portal URL, for example, https://p1.example.com:7443. This URL will be used to discover both machines in the highly available configuration and to register them with ArcGIS Web Adaptor.
- Upgrade the ArcGIS Server site serving as the portal's hosting server.
- Upgrade ArcGIS Web Adaptor (for ArcGIS Server) for IIS or Java (Windows).
- Upgrade ArcGIS Data Store.
- If your organization includes additional federated servers, upgrade them.
Most federated servers must match the version of the base ArcGIS Enterprise deployment. For more information about supported versions for federated servers, see Federate a server site.
See the upgrade information for the type of federated servers you need to upgrade:
- If you're using read-only mode, take the primary environment out of read-only mode and place the standby environment in read-only mode.
- Send traffic to the standby environment.
- Upgrade the primary environment using step 3.
Upgrade your highly available portal
To upgrade your highly available portal, you must install Portal for ArcGIS on both machines and continue the upgrade from either machine:
- Install Portal for ArcGIS on both portal machines.
You do not need to consider which machine is primary or standby; you can run the setup on both machines simultaneously.
- Open your ArcGIS Enterprise organization on either portal machine to continue with the upgrade.
The URL of your organization is in the format https://organization.example.com:7443/arcgis/home.
The steps to continue with the upgrade only need to be performed from one machine. You do not need to know which is primary or standby.
- Provide the path to your current license file and choose Continue portal upgrade.
- When the upgrade completes, click OK to acknowledge that the portal will restart.
- Once the portal has restarted and is accessible, run the post-upgrade operation on the same machine where the upgrade operation was initiated and run a health check on both machines.