SDE and/or Image Server Extension

[MikeBly]

HI All,

I am prepping some map services using AGOL, I would like to serve up our own imagery as a basemap for these services. Currently the imagery resides as a mosaic dataset within an SDE.

I have ArcGIS Server 10.1, can I publish an image service without having to install the Image Server Extension? My understanding is that it would be much faster if served through IMage Extension, is this the correct thinking? And is image extension now a part of the overall Server install?

Thanks,

Mike

[YungKaiChin]

You only need the extension if you want to public mosaic dataset as service.

Also, the extension does not increase the performance of an image service, but creating a cached image service will.

[JeffreySwain]

Any time you publish a mosaic dataset, you need the image server extension. To publish a basemap otherwise, you will need to mosaick the entire mosaic dataset together and fuse it into one file.   This is the old way of publishing image services - merge in SDE and publish from SDE with server.  The advantage of the mosaic dataset and image server is that you do not have to spend the processing time and file space to create the image service.  Without the image server extension, you are forced to utilize a large chunk of file space on your database to merge all the tiles and then can publish.  Please refer to this document to explain some of the differences with regard to capabilities and licenses.