In Esri ArcGIS Enterprise, load balancing is a crucial technique for optimizing system resource utilization. Load balancing involves distributing client workloads across multiple computing resources, such as physical servers, virtual servers, or clusters. It helps organizations balance system utilization, reduce risk, simplify service delivery and growth, and improve backend server security.
As the number of users and GIS servers increases, it becomes important to ensure optimal performance and resource utilization. To achieve this, ArcGIS employs load balancing techniques and technologies. This involves distributing client workload traffic across multiple server-based resources, such as GIS servers, to prevent any single resource from becoming overloaded. By distributing the workload, load balancing improves overall system performance and ensures efficient resource utilization.
ArcGIS supports different load balancing algorithms that consider various factors to determine how workload traffic is distributed.
- Current Connection Counts: This algorithm takes into account the number of active connections to each GIS server. It distributes new client requests to servers with lower connection counts, balancing the workload across the available resources.
- Host Utilization: This algorithm considers the current resource utilization of each GIS server. It distributes client requests to servers with lower utilization, ensuring that no single server becomes overloaded.
- Real-World Response Times: This algorithm measures the response times of the GIS servers to client requests. It directs new requests to servers with faster response times, optimizing the performance of the system.
Recommendations
To effectively manage ArcGIS users in your organization:
Implement load balancing to distribute client workload traffic across multiple computing resources.
A properly load-balanced system improves scalability by allowing you to add and subtract machines without modifying client applications or removing those applications from use. Also, with load balancing in place, typically only one IP address is exposed to the internet or intranet. This greatly reduces security risks because the internal topology of the network and system is hidden, and the number of breach points is reduced in case of attack. This method also simplifies service delivery and consumption by providing a single access point (such as URL).
By leveraging load balancing in an Esri ArcGIS Enterprise deployment, organizations can achieve improved scalability, enhance security posture, and simplify service delivery for their users.
If you have a simple ArcGIS configuration or require web-tier authentication, use ArcGIS Web Adaptor as your load balancer.
In its simplest configuration, a single-machine ArcGIS Enterprise base deployment uses two ArcGIS Web Adaptors to manage traffic to the ArcGIS Enterprise portal and to the ArcGIS Server. In more complex configurations, you can deploy third-party load balancers in front of your ArcGIS Servers.
ArcGIS Web Adaptor is an application that integrates ArcGIS Server with an existing web server. It also serves as a load balancer, providing a single endpoint that distributes incoming requests and enables web-tier authentication. Client traffic is forwarded to your ArcGIS Servers via a round-robin algorithm. ArcGIS Web Adaptor is easy to install and configure, and it is required for an ArcGIS Enterprise base deployment.
If you have advanced load balancing requirements, use a third-party load balancer that provides the capabilities you need (along with ArcGIS Web Adaptor, if you also need web-tier authentication).
Third-party load balancers are often used by more advanced site and network administrators. As with ArcGIS Web Adaptor, client traffic is directed to the load balancer, then forwarded to available servers or ArcGIS Web Adaptors. However, third-party load balancers also offer special capabilities including asymmetric load management, priority queuing, added HTTP security, SSL offload and acceleration, and TCP buffering. These additional features help organizations address advanced business and technical requirements.
GeoBusiness connects ArcGIS with Microsoft Dynamics 365, Oracle NetSuite, and other enterprise systems.
GeoBusiness is an Esri ArcGIS Location Intelligence Platform with real-time mapping, visualization, and geo-analytics. GeoBusiness enables organizations to monitor operations, share data, and create actionable intelligence through Location Intelligence technology.
GeoBusiness is Software as a service (SaaS) offering.
Who We Are
GCS is a Geospatial Information Technology Services Company delivering award-winning solutions.
Our team of geospatial IT and cloud certified professionals help organizations unlock and enable GIS technology. With over 200 years of combined technical expertise, GCS converts your ideas into reality through customer-driven, innovative applications. GCS customers gain strategic value through increased productivity, efficiency and profitability, optimizing mission-critical business processes.
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Since 2002, GCS has been an Esri Business Partner.
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