So the news at the DevSummit was that you could install both ArcGIS 9.4 alongside ArcGIS 9.3.1. I’m not part of the beta for 9.4, but reports are that ESRI has not enabled this yet for the latest 9.4 beta release. If you want to install 9.4 on a computer running ArcGIS 9.3.1, you are being prompted to uninstall 9.3.1 before continuing. Has anyone yet been able to run 9.4 and 9.3.1 at the same time?
Now this could be a limitation of the current beta and not actually any retreat by ESRI on being able to run two versions of ArcGIS on the same machine. Either way it make it really hard to beta test the 9.4 release as you can’t compare it to older versions.
Your Mamma Don’t Dance and your ArcGIS won’t install…
Note: If you post any specific 9.4 Beta information (such as quoting forums posts on the Beta forums), expect ESRI to personally contact you. They appear to be monitoring this blog post. You’ve been warned.
35 Comments
I work for an international ESRI distributor company and via the Tech Transfer sessions some of my colleagues attended (and later summarized for us), they were informed that the side-by-side install of ArcGIS Desktop 9.3 and 9.4 would not be supported as it had been announced at the Dev Summit. I don’t know if that extends to version 9.3.1 but I think it’s safe to assume it won’t be any different.
Running 9.4 and 9.3.1 at the same time is not going to happen. ESRI has given up on trying to make this happen as they couldn’t make it to work.
The above is as an official statement as we will probably get from them.
I recently asked this question and was told that ESRI would only support a virtual machine solution for running both. In other words no support.
I have using Windows XP Mode on Windows 7
Looks like this feature has been dropped completely from the 9.4 release due to complications. Since this was a feature that was highly touted at both the UC and Dev Conf. I think ESRI needs to get out in front of this or they are going to take a beating from the masses. Running side by side and running in a VM are two entirely different scenarios especially when dealing end users who are not familiar with virtual environments.
As an Arc user all the wayyyy back to ArcInfo rev 5 I have to ask what would be compelling enough to make anyone want to abuse themselves with 2 complete installs on one machine? I know 9.4 has some new goodies in it but do you REALLY need them bad enough right now to attempt that feat? I think one could just stay home and pound themselves in the head with a 2×4 for the same results.
Virtual Machine? Huh? Why bother.
ESRI doesn’t multi-thread (oh, wait, you can launch a server process in background, but that’s not really threaded), doesn’t recognize multi-core machines (that’s right, just buy a single core box, they don’t ’see’ the other cores) and won’t run in 64 bit.
What (legacy) strange (legacy) world are they (legacy) living in (legacy) that keeps them (legacy) stuck in the (legacy) past. Ahhh…the long tail of VB is wagging their dog.
BTW – if you expect to run VM, double your hardware, ’cause the (legacy) world of ESRI needs a little extra sumpin’ sumpin’ to stay fresh and run right (or at least as it would on a single-core machine)…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XJJwAZgAA0
The legacy they may be fighting is the COM framework on which most of ArcObjects is based. At past Developers Conferences I’ve asked if there are plans to migrate their libraires to pure .Net. The answer has always been, “No plans to do that. It would be too big and costly and not really necessary.” Still, I wonder. ArcGIS Desktop is the most unstable application I run on my machine. Random and unexplained crashes are still a fact of life with Desktop. It’s a little more stable with 9.3 but but Desktop fails more than all other Windows apps I run.
“not really necessary” – Wow, what short term thinking. All of ESRI’s inside track with academia and government will mean nothing when they become completely obsolete. Sure, it may not happen today or tomorrow, but how foolish is to continue to base your product on an old, outdated architecture, with no plans whatsoever to move forward? It would be one thing to say “We’re not going to do this anytime soon, but we have a team working on it.” but to say you have “no plans to do that”? Come on guys, please join the rest of us in the 21st century.
I wonder when Microsoft will rewrite Office on the .NET framework?
Touche.
I bet it’s before ESRI does.
ArcGIS on a Virtual Machine; eek! I bet’s that a wonder platform (‘I wonder if it’ll ever complete…’). Fine for looking at maps if you give it enough resources but anything else, must be like having teeth pulled. Very sloooowly.
The legacy issue is paramount as far as I can see, more important than having dll hell and version issues; I can always run different versions on different (physical) machines if I really need to but processing massive datasets is a pain with the lack of support for multi-threading, multi-core and 64-bit. I’ve got a brand spanking new processing box for use with ArcGIS now, with as many system bottlenecks removed as possible and whilst faster than anything else I’ve ever used, the fact is it’s only ever using one of its cores, which just plain sucks in this multi-core, multi-processor world. And the lack of 64-bit support goes hand in hand with this.
Come on Esri, if you’re going to tackle one big problem, make it the legacy issues!
It probably is just my setup but I find Desktop actually runs better in a VirtualPC (VPC) session. Faster and more stable. That is, if all the data is local to the VPC session. If I try to get data from my main laptop session (File GDB or SDE GDB) then it is much slower, but that I expect. It’s a USB2 connection between the laptop and the external disk that holds the VPC image. For testing or just learning about the new features the VPC route is the way to go. I highly recommend it.
A friend of mine runs Desktop in a Windows virtual session within OSx on an Apple laptop and desktop. He thinks it runs better than on any dedicated PC he ever ran Desktop on.
For several months I ran 9.3.1 Desktop on a VPC session and was quite impressed with the performance. About 3 weeks ago I finally migrated my main laptop to 9.3.1 and it is slower with program startup and map refreshes than 9.2 and my 9.3.1 VPC session . Go figure.
Same here for me. Works much better in a virtual environment (mostly because the virtual environment is essentially a perfectly clean install without tons of other crap running to slow it down).
Which of course requires a second OS license of Windows which can be impossible for many organizations.
Is that true for a personal system? I know that is true when running Windows Server on virtual machines. For a stand alone personal system I’m not sure. If you have an MSDN license this is not an issue. Of course, for the Apple user running a virtual session of Windows a license would be required. DG
Run Ubuntu and create a snapshot of your WinOS ArcMap virtual environment. Destroy the instance when you are done with it
It does all depend on the scale of GIS in your org. If your whole organization is doing GIS, then virtualizing all your desktops and doubling your OS licensing is not going to be that feasible (well, maybe if you try the idea I just mentioned). If you are one GIS guy in an org of 5,000, that one extra OS license is more manageable (particularly if it is a hosted VM that can be accessed on demand through the network).
I was in a meeting with ESRI developers last week, the ArcGIS product team mentioned that there were too many issues associated with version compatibility ( i.e. registry overwriting with the third party libraries they use and can’t control). It was deemed too difficult to accomplish for this and other reasons. This promise will go unfulfilled at 9.4
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Censorship is not cool.
I’ll verify that you definitely cannot install 9.4 beta and 9.3 on the same machine, and ESRI has said that this will not change. And that’s not a good thing, because 9.4 changes a lot of the workflows and interface that I am used to, particularly editing. I’d like to keep my 9.3 working so when I need to jump on something quick I can do that and not have to figure out where to find the cut polygon task. I’m using VirtualBox which is an open source (I think) VM and it works decently, but its a lot of trouble, particularly if you don’t have another licensed copy of Windows laying around to run on it. No, this was not good news at all.
I think ESRI have done a really good job with ArcGIS Server the last year when they introduced the simple and fast APIs for the AGS REST API. I heard rumours recently that they will phase out the complex WebADF and place more functionality availble through REST and other services.
I really hope that they will do the same on the desktop side just like they have done with the SDK for Explorer which is really easy to use.
Perhaps they should do what they did with AGS and rewrite ArcMap from scratch? But I guess they already done that with desktop when they moved from ArcView 3 to ArcMap. I dont think they will do something like that again..
“I heard rumours recently that they will phase out the complex WebADF”
That’s not a rumor. That’s a fact, Jack.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mfxcq77FkdE
No, because ESRI keeps telling the developers that the WebADF will still be further developed and updated (even said so at dev summit) but what I heard was that they might not do so after 9.4 anymore..
ADF is dead code walking.
I think dev effectively stopped a few months ago, actually. There’s what’s said in public, and what happens in Redlands. It’s always been so, and so shall it be in this case. So if you’re building anything on the stream, best ye stop.
There’s a sharp edge to the world and the good ship ADF is about to sail over… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Final-Frontier.jpg
James et al,
You are correct; you will need to remove 9.3.1 before installing 9.4 (and correct in that we are ‘watching’).
At Dev Summit ’09 and UC ’09 we had said you would be able to have both “side-by-side. Unfortunately just prior to beta 1 we uncovered a set of issues and workflows that made that solution unworkable. (Specifically around partner solutions, data sharing, data access…) We’ve circulated this message internally and to the beta users over the past month and are now sharing this message with a wider audience. (We just added a QA for this on the web site. http://www.esri.com/whatscoming) We understand that “side-by-side” was something that many of you want, and frankly we did as well, but we could not risk the stability of the final system based on what we uncovered. In talking to many IT groups it also became apparent that virtualization of desktops is becoming a more standard deployment option, and while machine intensive, does offer a solution for some customers.
As you may know we have a very open beta program for ArcGIS 9.4 going on now, any customer who’s current on their software can participate (and we have thousands already). If you’d like to try 9.4 while it’s in beta please drop an email to: 94betaquestions@esri.com. We have a series of forums and blogs ongoing on the secure beta site for this evolving community.
I hope this help answer some of the questions raised.
Thanks, Damian
ArcGIS Product Manager, ESRI dspangrud@esri.com
Virtualization is also a good first step towards cloud computing. http://blogs.gartner.com/thomas_bittman/2009/08/11/virtualization-unlocks-cloud-computing/
It will be interesting if some users wait to hold off on migrating to 9.4 to coincide with the migration to Win7. Win7’s built in XP virtual environment might make running a virtual machine a lot easier to manage in terms of ease and cost. I myself am holding off (a few weeks) installing the beta until until I get my new quad core Win7 workstation just because I think it will be easier to manage.
Quad core Win7 workstation for ESRI?
Remember, no multithreading, no multicore support…and you’re stuck in 32 so don’t bother with anything more than 4gigs of RAM, my friend.
Quad core still helps if you multitask. 64-bit also removes all that nasty memory overhead that reduces your application footprint to 2.5-3gb in a 32-bit OS. So, while ArcMap cannot fully use the hardware, it does benefit. Besides, ENVI runs as native 64-bit application, and that will use all the memory you can through at it.
All true, my friend.
Except there is no benefit to ArcMap – it’s still acting as if it’s on a single-threaded, single-core box with 32bit mem levels.
And I might say from our experience (we have many, many folks working with the tools every day) you’re just asking for a rocky road trying to fool the app into running on the 64bit machine. Crash, bam, boom.
We gave up, actually. Now we buy really cheap single processor machines with 4gigs of RAM and don’t waste money on wishing it would be better. The mem limit is 3.25 gigs under 32bit, BTW.
We do our Image Processing work on 64bit machines with mega-huge RAM loads…and save the little vector bits we extract from those tools off to the cute 30-toober boxes we use for the ESRI work.
VB lives on in umpty-ump legacy third-party tools hidden deep inside the core…much to Scott’s chagrin.
So when will there be a Linux Desktop version of ArcMap eh?
Why do I have a bad feeling that this is the “Vista” version of ArcGis? I have received nothing from ESRI saying that 9.4 could not be installed with 9.3.1. This is no way to beta test. Unfortunately, there are too many people that will not test the software, which will lead to insufficient input; my fear is that kinks will exist after the 9.4 release.
@DG “It probably is just my setup but I find Desktop actually runs better in a VirtualPC (VPC) session.”
I’ve not had a chance to try with ArcGIS in a VM yet, but with others it can, with the right setup, be faster in VM than on straight on the bare machine. The key apeasrs to have do with being able to load the whole OS into ram and avoid the disk IO bottleneck.
I’d still rather have 9.3x and 9.4 side by side, though not as much I want the API for the file gdb to be published.
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[...] ArcGIS 9.4 Beta 1, no 2, or ArcGIS 10 ? My inbox has been filling up with emails from ESRI about the Beta testing program for ArcGIS 9.4 (now 10). So I finally downloaded the new version. But I was wondering if I can keep my 9.3 installed while I take a look at 9.4. Maybe I didn’t have to download the 3GB installed after all because apparently you cannot. I found the answer on James Fee’s blog in a discussion thread that included some very interesting comments about ESRI’s aging technology. [...]