Windows Server 2008 & IIS 7.0

Hello

As I am now half way through TechEd 2007 I thought I would share some of my thoughts and discovereies on what I have seen so far.

My main focus of the past couple of days has been around web hosting and Sharepoint. I have been very impressed by what I have seen from IIS7.0. There have been some big improvements in IIS particularly relating to the administration of the service. It will be much easier to deploy multi-server web farms due to the new shard config files. No more configuring one server then copying the config to all the other servers in the farm. It is also possible to delegate permissions down to the site level which offers some new opportunities in the way that administrators and users interact with IIS7.0.

Of course IIS7.0 wouldn't be possible without a Server Operating System to run on and Windows Server 2008 is looking like a good offering from Microsoft. Whilst things could still change before it is released next year there is plenty that has matured nicely since Server 2003. I am looking forward to getting some proper hands on with the software to really try it out.

David

Comments

[Dan Germain]

Hi David. I assume the simple config for an IIS7 web farm then is to put content and config on shared storage (such as NAS/SAN), create several web servers (these could be virtual and physical couldn't they?) and load-balance an IP across them all. I can see that this would easily handle a complete server failure or IIS error, and scaling out for more performance would be very simple - add another server.

I guess with IIS7 there are still some limitations on the total number of sites, connections, memory usage etc. i.e. you couldn't load this farm to have 20,000 sites on it? How would you scale this - have several small web farms?

[David Jenkins]

Hi Dan. Microsoft's recommended config is indeed to have the shared config file on shared storage with the site data. The improvements to SMB in Server 2008 make this easier to implement on a UNC than before. I can see no reason not to virtualise the servers in the web farm if we wanted to.

As we use a hardware load balance then we will have to put all IP's for the farm into the config then assign each server the IP it will respond on. The only way to use a single IP per site is with Microsoft's own NLB.

There will be the usual limitations on memory, connections to the site data etc. I would say several small web farms would be a good way to scale this.