ArcGIS Server on Amazon EC2 - What's in the ArcGIS Server AMI

When you use the ArcGIS Server Amazon Machine Image (AMI) to launch an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance, you can expect to see the following programs and configurations on your resulting virtual machine:

Operating system and Web server

The operating system is Microsoft Windows, with Internet Information Services (IIS) 7 installed as a web server. Windows Server 2008 R2 is used beginning with the ArcGIS Server 10.0 Service Pack 3 AMI. Prior ArcGIS Server AMIs use Windows Server 2008 R1. The AMIs are built from the latest available Amazon public images containing this operating system and SQL Server Express.

Attached storage

A 100 GB Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volume is attached to your EC2 instance. This volume is mounted as drive D. It contains server directories and sample data as described later in this topic. This volume is included to help you avoid placing GIS data or caches directly on the C drive of your EC2 instance. Storing your data and caches on the EBS volume preserves your data if your instance is ever terminated and allows you to easily create data backups or snapshots.

Caution:

If you terminate your EC2 instance, the attached EBS volume is not terminated and will continue to accrue charges until you explicitly delete it. You can view and delete the volume using the Volumes page of the AWS Management Console. Alternatively, you can keep the volume and attach it to another instance.

Installed programs

The following programs are installed on top of the Windows operating system:

ArcGIS Server 10.0

ArcGIS Server 10.0 is installed, including ArcGIS Server Manager, ArcGIS Services Directory, and ArcGIS Server Help.

ArcGIS Desktop 10.0

ArcGIS Desktop 10.0 is installed, including ArcMap, ArcCatalog, ArcGlobe, ArcReader, ArcScene, and ArcGIS Desktop Help. ArcGIS Desktop is included to help you author or modify your GIS services for publishing to ArcGIS Server.

SQL Server 2008 R2 Express

SQL Server 2008 R2 Express and SQL Server Management Studio are installed. You can use SQL Server to store geodatabase data or stand-alone tables. SQL Server is also the recommended user and role store for ArcGIS Server security on Amazon.

ArcGIS Server accounts

ArcGIS Server uses several local operating system accounts to access data and launch processes:

arcgissom—The SOM account
arcgissoc—The SOC account
arcgiswebservices—The ArcGIS Web Services account
arcgisstartup—An account used to run the ArcGIS Server AMI StartUp Service
This service runs when you start an EC2 instance of ArcGIS Server.

These accounts are preconfigured on your EC2 instance with random passwords unknown to anyone at Esri. You do not need to run the GIS Server Post Install or the Web Applications Post Install to configure these accounts.

You need to give the SOC account Windows permissions to access any data that you will publish through a service. The SOC account has already been granted access to the preconfigured data and server directories on drive D (see below).

ArcGIS Server directories

The ArcGIS Server cache, input, jobs, and output directories are created and registered with ArcGIS Server for you. Their physical location is under D:\arcgisserver. You can register other directories if you choose, but you should avoid putting them on the C drive.

None of the ArcGIS Server directories are shared by default. If you want to share these folders, you must configure the sharing manually.

Sample data and services

Several services are preconfigured for you on the EC2 instance. You can preview these in the ArcGIS Services Directory once you log in to your EC2 instance and authorize the software.

These sample services help you understand whether your instance and its GIS Web services are running correctly. They also provide a pattern of how to store your data.

The source data for the services is in D:\GIS Data. You'll notice a preconfigured connection to this GIS Data folder in ArcCatalog. This folder is not shared by default, and if you want it to be visible in Manager when you create services, you must manually share it.

1/30/2013