About using your portal with ArcGIS Server
ArcGIS Server is software that makes GIS web services available to others in your organization and optionally anyone with an Internet connection. Using Portal for ArcGIS with your ArcGIS Server site provides the following benefits:
- Portal for ArcGIS helps transform your ArcGIS Server services into information products. Using the portal, you can organize your services into web maps and share them with groups of users.
- Portal for ArcGIS organizes your information products and enables easy discovery. This is accomplished through portal galleries, groups, and search capabilities.
- Portal for ArcGIS helps control access to ArcGIS Server services, through portal groups.
- Portal for ArcGIS allows users to publish data and maps to a wider audience as web services. As a portal administrator you can allow this by assigning an ArcGIS Server site to act as a hosting server.
Levels of integration between the portal and the server
A portal and an ArcGIS Server site can be integrated to various levels, depending on your organization's needs. Three common approaches to integration are described in more detail below.
- Registering services
- Federating a server
- Designating a hosting server
You can combine these approaches to meet the level of integration necessary for your organization. For example, your portal might expose items from a federated server along with items individually registered from other servers.
Registering services
You can register ArcGIS Server services as items in the portal, allowing portal users to easily find them and add them to web maps. The services can come from your own ArcGIS Server site or other sites. Registering services is the most loosely coupled way in which a server can be integrated with a portal.
This approach requires only a server to host the portal; you do not need to have your own ArcGIS Server. The Web Adaptor can be placed on the same server or on a separate, dedicated web server.
You can register services from versions 9.3 and newer. If your portal requires encrypted communication through HTTPS, the services you register must use HTTPS if they are from outside your domain.
When you register a service as a portal item, the life-spans of the service and the item are not connected. In other words, if the underlying service goes away, you are responsible for deleting the item from your portal.
Federating a server
Federating an ArcGIS Server site with your portal is an advanced configuration for tightly integrating the security and sharing models of your portal with the ArcGIS Server site. When you federate a server, authorization to access the services is delegated to the portal. This means:
- You access ArcGIS Server using portal users. ArcGIS Server users and roles are no longer used. Portal administrators, publishers, and users become ArcGIS Server administrators, publishers, and users, respectively. By consolidating portal and server users, you simplify the administration of GIS resources and ensure a single sign-on experience when accessing secured ArcGIS Server resources.
- Access to ArcGIS Server services is controlled by the portal's sharing model. Every ArcGIS Server service you publish to your federated server is automatically shared as an item in the portal. The sharing model of the portal allows you to keep the service private to its publisher or shared with one or more groups of portal users. Alternatively, you can share the item with your whole organization (any logged in user) or enable anonymous access so that anyone can view it. This sharing model gives you an extra level of granularity when defining access to your ArcGIS Server services.
The following diagram shows that, once an ArcGIS Server site is federated with the portal, services published to the federated server are automatically shared with the portal. Also, portal users are used to access both the portal and the federated server. Note that, though this diagram shows only one federated ArcGIS Server site, you can have multiple ArcGIS Server sites federated with the portal. All federated ArcGIS Server sites are accessed using portal accounts, not ArcGIS Server accounts.
The diagram below shows a typical hardware layout for a federated server approach, along with the URL format you might use to connect to each component.
Only ArcGIS Server sites using version 10.2 or later can be federated with a portal.
Designating a hosting server
A federated server can be even further integrated with your portal if you designate it as a hosting server. A hosting server allows portal users to
- Publish tiled map and feature services to the portal from ArcGIS for Desktop.
- Share layers and maps from Esri Maps for Office.
- Create maps by adding CSV files and shapefiles from local machines to the portal map viewer.
- Publish CSV and shapefiles as feature services from the portal website.
A configured hosting server is the highest level of integration that can be achieved between a portal and an ArcGIS Server site.
When exposing a hosting server, you need to closely monitor server resources and usage to ensure the server can bear the load from the portal users. If you anticipate many users creating map tiles or hosting large numbers of services, you might want to add GIS servers to your ArcGIS Server site before you configure the hosting server.
To designate a server as a hosting server, you must register an enterprise geodatabase as the ArcGIS Server managed database. When users publish hosted feature services to your portal, the data will be copied to the managed database. The managed database is also required to allow portal users to add CSV files and shapefiles to the map or share layers and maps from Esri Maps for Office.
The diagram below shows a typical architecture for a portal that is connected to a hosting server. The managed database and an additional GIS server are also shown.
See Configuring a hosting server for your portal to learn how to set up a hosting server.