Question

Pros and Cons of installing ArcGIS Pro or ArcGIS Desktop on FME Server for ArcPy

  • 5 September 2021
  • 2 replies
  • 11 views

We are new to FME and just have FME server up and running now. We are in the process of moving some of our existing workflows that we have built using FME extension for ArcGIS and so far we're having success publishing. We have some workspaces that error when we try and run them because we reference Python for Esri 3.6+ or Python 2.7. So far these particular workspaces haven't really needed arcpy so we just changed the parameter in the workspace and republished and they ran ok. Our server is a single, standalone machine with all components running locally. A little about the machine: We have 8GB RAM, 40GB free space on disk right now, it's a virtual machine running on hyperflex with 1 socket and 2 virtual processors (2.39GHz). So now I'm wondering if we should install ArcGIS Pro and or ArcGIS Desktop (for python 2.7) on the FME server machine so we can allow our GIS team to migrate some of their arcpy scripts to FME that do use arcpy. It would help them manage them centrally and schedule them. We are also looking at bringing onboard an ArcGIS Notebooks server in the near future so that's in the mix as well. Finally, we do have a significant number of python 2.7 scripts that we're considering managing on FME server as well. Any tips, pros, cons, or advice for us as we make this decision would be greatly appreciated. If having not having access to the arcpy library will hinder the GIS team, I'm ok installing it, but I don't want to bog down the server either. Thanks in advance.


2 replies

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Hi @j_sheldon​! If you're looking to use ArcGIS desktop you will need to check the ESRI license agreement first. For ArcGIS Pro it would help to refer to this article to set it up correct for the FME Server environment: https://community.safe.com/s/article/Using-ArcGIS-Pro-with-FME-Server

There shouldn't be any issues running Python scripts as FME Engine will honor the "python compatibility" settings in the workspaces. Hope this helps!

Hi @j_sheldon​! If you're looking to use ArcGIS desktop you will need to check the ESRI license agreement first. For ArcGIS Pro it would help to refer to this article to set it up correct for the FME Server environment: https://community.safe.com/s/article/Using-ArcGIS-Pro-with-FME-Server

There shouldn't be any issues running Python scripts as FME Engine will honor the "python compatibility" settings in the workspaces. Hope this helps!

Thank you @jennaatsafe​ . I've been reviewing that article, and I'm thinking that because of how we license ArcGIS Pro, we might have trouble with that. We license ArcGIS pro through ArcGIS online using named user accounts, but they aren't network accounts. Our FME service is setup to use a local system account for FME server so I'm not sure how that would work on a licensing level after reading through the online documentation. I think we might be ok with ArcGIS desktop since we license that concurrently with a local license server. In addition to being able to run arcpy, I'm now thinking we may need to do this since we're also going to want to be able to write to SDE Geodatabases as part of our workflows as well, and I think this requires either ArcGIS desktop or ArcGIS pro from what I understand so far.

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