Hi Neil,
While I don’t have any experience using ArcGIS Server in an academic environment, I do have experience using it in a government environment which may be relevant to the questions you ask.
Regarding hosting ArcGIS Server in AWS: This sounds like a good idea, as it eliminates the need to purchase and maintain in-house hardware. However, I don’t think you’re going to have success using an AWS “free tier” EC2 instance to host ArcGIS Server:
· The “free tier” AWS EC2 instance is a “t2.micro” instance. This gives you 2 GB of RAM.
· According to the ESRI website, ArcGIS Server 10.5 requires 8 GB of RAM to run.
In other words, you’d be trying to fit a size-8 foot into a size-2 shoe!
At the very least, you’ll need a “t2.large” instance, which offers 8 GB of RAM. Even this might not be enough, as ArcGIS Server tends to like a lot of RAM in order to be happy. I recall having tried to bring up an early version of ArcGIS Server on a machine with 4 GB of RAM. At the time (something like 7 or 8 years ago), 4 GB was supposed to be adequate. However, in practice, it didn’t work very well. We saw a variety of weird rendering problems that we weren’t able to diagnose, much less fix. So we abandoned doing anything with ArcGIS Server until we could purchase beefier hardware.
If you’re going to run ArcGIS Server, I’d recommend hosting it on a machine (whether in your own data center, in AWS, or in some other cloud provider) with as much RAM as you can afford.
Best regards,
Ben
Benjamin Krepp | GIS Programmer/Analyst
CENTRAL TRANSPORTATION PLANNING STAFF
857.702.3670 | [log in to unmask]
From: Northeast Arc Users Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Neil Curri
Sent: Monday, June 05, 2017 5:03 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: ArcGIS server & ArcGIS Online
Curious to know if anyone out there has experience using ArcGIS Server in an academic environment. We've been using ArcGIS Online here for a couple of years, and this past year ended up exceeding the annual credit allotment. Purchasing additional credits is relatively cheap and easy, and might be the simplest way to go. However, we plan to host more data associated with local natural resource inventories, campus infrastructure, and historic maps. So, I've started to think about implementing Server to store feature services tiles, and maybe some geocoding services and analysis tools, and using ArcGIS Online more for maps and apps. Seems like this is how other organizations use both. My thought was to run ArcGIS Server on AWS; I sent an inquiry to Amazon to see if we can start on their free tier. If we expand usage beyond the limitations, then we could consider continuing with AWS or standing up our own server. Should be a relatively low cost way to try this out. Any comments or thoughts welcome.
Thanks.
Neil Curri
GIS Analyst, PVE, LLC
Vassar College Academic Computing Consultant
[log in to unmask] | 845-437-7708 | 845-664-2100 (mobile)
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