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I am looking to rebuild the current webfarm setup where I work. Currently we have 4 regions. Each region has 3 WFE's on a ViP. Each of the three has a separate implementation of IIS 7.5 and ColdFusion 9.

Whenever a change needs to be made in IIS, we have to make it on all three servers (we are not currently using shared config). Additionally, we use DFS to replicate from the share to the WFE's (hub and spoke), which uses an enormous amount of storage.

I am tasked with rebuilding the environment in a way that is easier to manage and maintain. I am thinking of doing a shared config on the WFE's with virtual directories tied back to a single content share. While this saves on storage, it provides a single point of failure which is a problem.

Does anyone have any advice on IIS best practices in a large environment like this?

Thanks!

Acerbity
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1 Answers1

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Acerbity,

IIS.NET has a nice article on designing a web farm. This article is geared toward Server 2012, so you can ignore the "Plan SSL Central Certificate Store" section as that is an IIS8 feature (and pretty awesome one that that when it comes to web farm management). This aricle walks through the planning steps for the different shared configuration (shared config, shared content). There is also a section on load balancing that focuses primarily on Application Request Routing (ARR)...this section you can probably also ignore as I am assuming you have some kind of load balancing strategy in place already.

IIS.NET has another article that focuses on setting up a server farm using the Web Farm Framework (WFF) that you can find HERE. WFF is a really neat tool that will help you manage you servers and the content/configuration for each. It using the web deployment handler to sync everything in your farm and is quite powerful. However, it doesn't appear to be actively developed on, but of course MS won't say either way if they are ever going to release a new version for IIS8+.

pkeenan
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  • As a part of this migration I am able to choose 2012 if I think it's best. Thanks for the link, this looks like exactly what I was trying to find. – Acerbity Jan 09 '14 at 16:10