Professional Microsoft IIS 8

Operational Tasks

The first half of this chapter covered the management approaches you can use to build an operations program that yields a higher rate of success in meeting the uptime and performance demands of your website. In the remaining sections of this chapter, we cover some specific tasks to which every IIS administrator must attend: backing up and restoring web servers.

Backup and Restore Program

One operation that stands at the top of priorities for any administrator of any server is ensuring an adequate backup/restore program. Should an administrator fail in this task, the server and the applications that it hosts are in serious jeopardy of failing miserably should anything unfavorable occur to the server. Although IIS 8.0 is the most secure and stable web platform that Microsoft has released to date, given their position in the perimeter network and their high traffic profiles, IIS servers are more susceptible to attack and failure than any other infrastructure server. In this light, maintaining operational fallbacks (backup) and defense (antivirus) are relatively inexpensive insurance policies against the likely faults to which any IIS server is susceptible.

In this section, we outline a disaster recovery program sufficient for enterprise-class SLAs. The program we present below is just a sample, however, and you should take this as a starting point only. Our discussion includes a stepwise review of some basic backup tasks and an approach to backups as an operational ...