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Wednesday, 27 February 2019

Administering ArcGIS for Server

Installing and configuring ArcGIS for Server to publish, optimize, and secure GIS services

Foreword GIS is a mature industry, with its roots in the late 60s in forestry and county polygon maintenance through vector topology (others such as GRASS and IDRISI concentrated on the raster domain). Storing location and attribute information has been a challenge, not only since the early days of severely limited computing power and storage space, but even today in the management of ever-growing spatial and tabular repositories. 
Administering ArcGIS for Server
This has been handled in several ways: two tenors being Esri Arc/Info separating the spatial and the tabular repositories, and Oracle Spatial embedding them in database tables. Esri evolved from the desktop to the server by offering SDE, a layer between its data and RDBMS that effectively spatialises database tables. After the arrival of the Internet, further web services have been devised by commercial and open source technologies alike, but that is a subject in its own right? And while RDBMS scales hardware such as Oracle Exadata, as data expands to petabytes in real time, a whole other arena such as Amazon services or SAP in-memory addresses Big Data. But what about big geo data? ArcGIS for Server is the third generation that adds a host of management, integrity, and performance tools designed to help implement scalable enterprise GIS. Hussein is a geo enthusiast, whose chief concern is to make the "Gen 3" mid-section above amenable to geo experts and project engineers alike. As a practitioner in the field, he brings a deft touch to the ins-and-outs of this powerful yet complex offering. Esri being the de facto server geo standard, this book will benefit a wide array of infrastructure administrators and application engineers. Yet Hussein's clear prose explains it well enough; his first principles will allow his audience to apply their lessons learned to other platforms, and therein lies the "sweet spot": ArcGIS for Server offers interoperability to many other server and service platforms. This book will thus be a great learning guide to help you understand the interconnectivity of data and applications. The biggest takeaway may be that readers will discover the "Internet of things" as a real-world paradigm, rather than just concepts "in the clouds" or "in the cloud". As an IT and poet friend once said: "Ladies and gentlemen… start your servers… and let the geo begin!"

Preface If you are at a library and you grabbed this book, chances are that you have heard about ArcGIS for Server in a meeting and you want to know what this product is and what it is capable of. You might have picked up this book because you were explicitly asked by your manager to investigate the capability of this bleedingedge technology and report with tangible results. Or maybe you are a system administrator who is in the middle of implementing ArcGIS for Server as your backbone architecture. Whether you are a curious blogger, a business developer, or a technical system analyst, I can guarantee that this book won't disappoint you. Administering ArcGIS for Server was designed for all levels. You might get a satisfying definition of the product and its components, with comprehensive and straightforward illustrations, by reading the first chapter of this book. If you want to just test ArcGIS for Server, you can get it up and running in testing track—a quick, simple, and efficient method for installation—and do the exercises in most of the chapters. If you are planning to set up ArcGIS for Server on your production environment, you can fully read all of the chapters and appendices and explore the advanced security preferences and performance tips to make your setup run optimally.

What this book covers 
Chapter 1, Best Practices for Installing ArcGIS for Server, introduces the product and illustrates its architecture and components. It then takes you through three tracks for installing the product: the simple testing track, the advanced tech-savvy production track, and finally the last track, which will show you how to set up and configure ArcGIS for Server specifically as a virtualized environment. Chapter 2, Authoring Web Services, teaches you the concept behind a web service and different communication protocols. You will also learn how to author and publish GIS services so various clients can consume them.

Chapter 3, Consuming GIS Services, illustrates how to consume services that you learned to author and publish in the previous chapter. You will learn how to visualize, edit, and analyze services using different clients. Chapter 4, Planning and Designing GIS Services, is where you will analyze requirements and plan what services you want to have. You then will use the planning result to design the services you nominated with rich UML tools. You will also learn to design the underlying geodatabase, which is the source that feeds these services. Chapter 5, Optimizing GIS Services, shows you how to select the correct parameters and preferences that will make your ArcGIS for Server run at its optimal state. Optimization techniques such as pooling, process isolation, and caching can be applied to bring the most out of your ArcGIS for Server and make your services run much more efficiently and effectively. Chapter 6, Clustering and Load Balancing, introduces the concept of clustering, a new technique that allows you to group machines into a cluster. You can then assign services to run on each cluster based on machine power, memory, or even on networking factors. Chapter 7, Securing ArcGIS for Server, introduces different security mechanisms available on ArcGIS for Server. GIS-tier authentication, Web authentication, and HTTPS can be applied interchangeably, depending on the security level desired by your organization. Chapter 8, Server Logs, will teach you how to harvest the logs and reports generated by ArcGIS for Server and use them to monitor your system effectively. There are different levels of logs, ranging from abstract to detailed, and the level you configure for your setup will depend on how thoroughly you want to monitor your ArcGIS for Server. Fine and detailed logs come with a performance penalty. Appendix A, Selecting the Right Hardware, describes how to select the right hardware for your ArcGIS for Server environment by providing general rules of thumb. I have come up with formulas that you can use to calculate the number of cores and amount of memory required to serve your users. Appendix B, Server Architecture, will display the difference between the old and the new ArcGIS for Server architecture. You are going to learn how ArcGIS for Server has survived the 32-bit architecture locking trap and migrated to the more effective 64-bit architecture.

What you need for this book 
You need the following software for this book: • A Browser, preferably Google Chrome, which you can download from http://www.google.com/chrome. • Esri ArcGIS for Server 10.2 or 10.1, preferably 10.2, which you can download a trial of from http://www.esri.com/software/arcgis/trial or order from your local Esri distributor. • Esri ArcGIS for Desktop 10.2 or 10.1, preferably 10.2, which you can download a trial of from http://www.esri.com/software/arcgis/trial or order from your local Esri distributor. • Microsoft SQL Server Express 2012, which you can download for free from http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=29062. • Oracle VirtualBox, which you can download for free from https://www.virtualbox.org/.

Who this book is for
 Whether you are a GIS user, analyst, DBA, system administrator, or programmer with a basic knowledge of Esri GIS, this book is for you. Although the book is tailored to fit system administration and analyst requirements, users can find it equally useful. Each chapter segregates the advanced technical tips from the basic and required tasks. This makes it easier for users to perform only the necessary steps to run the software.

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