A single-machine deployment with the hosting server role is ideal here. It’s a common, manageable pattern for most organizations. It supports creating feature services (hosted feature layers) which allow for attachments (photos/notes) and are optimized for editing and querying. The scenario doesn’t indicate high user volume or critical uptime needs that would necessitate a more complex, multi-machine or highly available setup at this stage.

Dynamic map services render images on-the-fly for each request, which is computationally intensive and slower, especially for complex data. Cached tile services serve pre-rendered image tiles, offering significantly faster display performance in web applications. For basemaps or operational layers that don’t require real-time symbology changes, creating a cache is a standard performance optimization. The other options relate to configuration or permissions, which would typically cause a failure to draw at all, not just slow performance.

The ‘Force HTTPS’ setting in the portal’s Security configuration is designed specifically for this issue. When enabled, it ensures all URLs generated by the portal (for resources, thumbnails, etc.) use the HTTPS protocol, preventing ‘mixed content’ warnings that occur when an HTTPS page loads some resources over HTTP. Configuring ArcGIS Server for HTTPS is also good practice but doesn’t directly control the portal’s internal URL generation. Editing configuration files directly is not the recommended approach when a built-in administrative setting exists.

The scenario demands high availability (surviving a machine failure) and supports many concurrent editors. A multi-machine, highly available ArcGIS Server site with multiple GIS Server machines behind a load balancer provides fault tolerance and scales editing capacity. A relational data store (part of ArcGIS Data Store) is the required and optimized repository for hosting feature layers that support editing. A single server machine creates a single point of failure. The other options focus on portal redundancy (not the primary editing bottleneck) or big data stores, which are not for transactional feature editing.

For ArcGIS Server to access and publish data from an external RDBMS like SQL Server, that database must first be registered as a data store with the server site. This process provides the server with the connection information and credentials it needs to read the data. Simply creating the geodatabase and connecting to it from ArcGIS Pro is not enough for the server. The other options are either incorrect (there is no specific ‘geodatabase’ capability) or describe client-side, not server-side, configuration steps.

Creating and sharing web maps is a core function of the portal, which acts as the central hub for content, collaboration, and apps in ArcGIS Enterprise. ArcGIS Server Manager is used for administering the server site itself—its services, machines, security, and data stores. While you can view service details in the portal, the deep configuration of services (like starting/stopping, setting instance counts, or viewing detailed logs/stats) is done in Server Manager or ArcGIS Pro. The portal provides the user-facing layer of organization and sharing.

The Web Adaptor is a separate component (IIS/Apache application) that sits in front of ArcGIS Server. Updating its SSL certificate is a Web Adaptor operation. The correct steps are to install the new certificate on the web server, update the Web Adaptor’s binding to use it, and restart the Web Adaptor application or web server. Finally, if the public URL of the server changed (e.g., from HTTP to HTTPS or a different domain), you must update the federated server URL in the portal’s settings. There is no need to stop services, use read-only mode, or unfederate for a simple certificate update on the Web Adaptor.

ArcGIS Data Store is designed with specialized types for different data. The Relational data store is optimized for transactional editing, querying, and synchronization of hosted feature layers. The Tile Cache data store is optimized for serving high-performance tile layers (cached map/image services). Using separate, dedicated data stores is the recommended architecture as it allows each store to be managed, backed up, and potentially scaled independently according to its specific workload. Using a single store for both or not using Data Store at all would lead to suboptimal performance and management.

For built-in portal accounts (created and managed within the portal itself), Portal for ArcGIS acts as its own identity provider. It stores and validates usernames and passwords in its own secure, internal identity store. Authentication against Active Directory or an enterprise LDAP involves configuring an enterprise log-in, which is a different identity provider type. The federated ArcGIS Server has its own separate user and role store for server-level security. The Web Adaptor can be configured for authentication, but that is an additional, optional layer, not the primary mechanism for built-in accounts.

A single-machine deployment with the hosting server role is ideal here. It’s a common, manageable pattern for most organizations. It supports creating feature services (hosted feature layers) which allow for attachments (photos/notes) and are optimized for editing and querying. The scenario doesn’t indicate high user volume or critical uptime needs that would necessitate a more complex, multi-machine or highly available setup at this stage.0