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Apply patches and updates to highly available components

It’s important that you ensure the operating system and the ArcGIS Enterprise software on each of your machines are up to date with the most recent patches to address security issues and software bugs and to keep the environment running correctly. There are some things to keep in mind when patching a highly available ArcGIS Enterprise environment.

Make sure that you patch each component at different times. You shouldn’t patch both portal machines, all server machines, or both ArcGIS Data Store machines at the same time. Instead, patch them one at a time to make sure that there is always availability at that tier. Your organization’s change management protocols should account for what to do if a machine fails during a software or hardware update.

The following processes help you safely apply patches to highly available components in your ArcGIS Enterprise deployment while minimizing downtime and risk of data loss.

Apply patches to a highly available portal

When preparing to install a patch on a highly available portal, consider the possibility of failover. If you patch the primary portal, the standby machine will be promoted to primary. To avoid any failover, you can consider patching the standby first:

  1. Install patches on the standby portal.
  2. Stop the Portal for ArcGIS service on the standby portal to ensure it doesn’t promote itself to primary.
  3. Install patches on the primary portal and make sure it restarts correctly.
  4. Start the portal service on the standby portal.

If you’re not concerned with failover, you can install patches to only cause one failover:

  1. Install patches on the standby portal.
  2. Install patches on the primary portal. This will cause the primary portal to failover and promote the standby portal to primary.

Apply patches to highly available server sites

There are no primary or standby roles within a multiple-machine ArcGIS Server site, so there is no concept of failover. Each machine can be patched in any order, because each machine participates on equal terms in the site.

Again, it’s important to make sure that there is always one machine available to take any incoming requests. If this is a federated server site, ensure that the administrative URL for the site goes through a load balancer that regularly performs machine health checks. The load balancer can therefore notify you and act when it detects an outage.

Apply patches to a highly available ArcGIS Data Store

Like the portal, a highly available ArcGIS Data Store operates in a primary-standby fashion, and therefore will be affected by the order of patching. By default, ArcGIS Data Store won’t failover if the service is stopped. If you patch the primary ArcGIS Data Store machine first, your hosted services and any functionality dependent on ArcGIS Data Store won’t work.

To maintain availability while applying patches, follow the steps below:

  1. Sign in to the ArcGIS Server Administrator Directory.
  2. Browse to data > items > enterpriseDatabases > (data store name) > machines. Identify which machine is the standby for ArcGIS Data Store.
  3. Install patches on the standby machine.
  4. Promote the standby to primary via the makePrimary operation. From the machines page in the directory, click the standby machine’s link and click makePrimary.
  5. Install patches on the former primary machine once it has become the standby machine.

You should regularly check for patches and updates to ArcGIS Enterprise throughout your deployment.