Professional IIS 7.0

Chapter 16. Configuring and Load-Balancing Web Farms

At the time of this writing, prior to the final release of IIS 7.0, half of the top ten busiest web sites in the world are running IIS, and within the Fortune 100 sites, more sites are running IIS than any other web platform. This speaks volumes to the scalability and reliability that previous versions of IIS already have in the world of busy web sites.

IIS 7.0 builds on this already solid platform with some welcome additions to web farm support. This chapter covers the new shared configuration infrastructure, which provides centralized IIS configuration files for all servers in a web farm. It also looks at what you need to consider to ensure that there isn't any single point of failure and that your web farm is able to withstand most any type of hardware or software failure, while still maintaining a fully operational web site.

After looking at the new IIS 7.0 features, this chapter will look at content replication, load-balancing options, and several other things to consider to effectively manage a web farm of any size.

IIS 7.0 and Web Farms

IIS 6.0 was capable of scaling out to virtually any number of web servers and had tools like IISCnfg.vbs to keep the IIS metabase in sync between the nodes. With this solid foundation already in place, there are a surprisingly small number of features that IIS 7.0 needs to add.

IISCnfg.vbs is no longer available with IIS 7.0 but has been replaced with AppCmd.exe and the new shared configuration, ...