Professional Microsoft IIS 8

IIS 8.0 Features

IIS 8.0 has a number of new features and improvements, some of which have been released for IIS 7.5 as out-of-band updates on www.iis.net. Many of these new features are due to the updates within the new operating system, though, and cannot be ported back to older versions of IIS. The Application Warm-Up module, for example, was released for IIS 7.5 and is built into IIS 8.0, but a central store for SSL certificates requires Windows Server 2012 and is available only on IIS 8.0.

SSL Changes

Changes to SSL within Windows Server 2012 naturally affect IIS 8.0 as well. In IIS 8.0, certificates are no longer restricted to a site but are managed through a central certificate store, making management of multiple sites in large web farms far less time-consuming. In addition, SSL certificates no longer need to be bound to an IP address, and deployment or configuration of SSL can now be done through simple PowerShell cmdlets. SSL and TLS are covered in Chapter 15.

CPU Throttling

The CPU throttling process in IIS 8.0 has been improved, allowing sites to use more CPU when needed but throttling CPU cycles back to preset limits when there is contention between sites for the CPU. IIS 7.0 on Windows Server 2008 would simply kill a process that required too much CPU, effectively making CPU throttling a dangerous practice on heavily used servers. In IIS 8.0, administrators can set a limit for CPU use that the system will allow a process to exceed if the CPU is available. Otherwise, ...