How have folks architected sites and clusters in ArcGIS for Server 10.1/10.2?

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04-14-2015 01:28 AM
DavidKlein1
New Contributor II

Hello,

Large Australian electric utility here.  We are in the process of upgrading from ArcGIS/ArcFM 10.0 to 10.2.1.  A brief outline of the current 10.0 Server environment:

  • 37 map services
  • 7 SOM servers
  • 8 additional SOC servers
  • 1000 web GIS users, typically 250 concurrent

We made the decision some months ago to move all of our map services to a single site with a single cluster.  This site was to include 12 servers, running Win 2k12 with 4 core and 8GB RAM each.  Our test environment has only 2 servers in it, and has been performing OK through most of the project.  We had no reason to believe that going into production with 12 would be anything but much faster.  Then last week, Esri-AU came to us, freshly returned to Oz from the Esri Developer Conference, and said it is recommended to not include greater than 4 servers in any given site; that the chattiness between the servers can degrade performance. 

Apparently this issue is fixed at 10.3, but that is not an option for us.  We need to find a way to make it perform at 10.2.

Now, to try to substantiate this recommendation, we have added more servers to that test environment, and done a series of load tests with 1,2,4, and 8 servers in the site.  We have thus far seen little evidence that going above 4 is any real problem...we have only run into performance issues where we did not have enough threads for a given service or 2.  (and we know we can configure around this)

My question is this:  how have other people  - especially large organisations - elected to lay out your ArcGIS Server 10.1/10.2 environments?  I am interested in:

  • number of services
  • number of users
  • number of servers (including core count and RAM)
  • number of sites
  • number of clusters per site

Any wisdom and experience anyone can pass on would be much appreciated!!

David

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2 Replies
BrianBaldwin
Esri Regular Contributor

David,

Sorry that you haven't gotten any replies yet.  I'll try forwarding this question on to some of our folks here in Redlands to see what customers in the US have encountered with an upgrade to 10.2, as there have been a number that have done this recently.

Stay tuned.

-----------------------------------

Brian Baldwin, Esri Inc., Lead Solution Engineer
https://www.linkedin.com/in/baldwinbrian
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MichaelVolz
Esteemed Contributor

David:

If you have all 12 servers in the same cluster, then 1 mapservice with 2 instances will spin up 24 instances where most of these instances would just be taking up Memory when they are idle.  I would think this would be a drawback to putting all the servers in the same cluster.

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