Professional IIS 7.0

Chapter 3. Planning Your Deployment

Deploying Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7.0 is a journey, and as in all journeys, you need to know three things: your starting point, your ending point, and the path between. The starting and ending points seem to be the most obvious, but the failure to determine them accurately is why the path in many deployments seems to wander astray. There are also many paths in between—all of which lead to the same point, and all of which have different terrain to be negotiated.

In many deployment scenarios, there are two landscapes to be traversed. The first is technical and is often the easiest. Which piece of hardware or which software setting to use for a specific task is often straightforward. But combining that with the second landscape, which is organizational, will determine which technical choices can be made. Many times the best technical choice is not the best organizational choice, and it is often hard for administrators to accept, or even see, the organizational hills and valleys that must be traversed.

In this chapter, you will learn what technical choices are available and some options for applying those choices in the organizational landscape. If your organization has no limits to resources like cash and manpower, you will find your choices unlimited. But, if your organization is like most, resources will dictate your range of choices. You may find that your choices are further limited by management choices, developer needs, and other constraints ...