Hey all,
I did notice this post but am looking for more specifics.
I have 2 servers running Windows 2008 Server Web Edition and am running websites on both of them. I would like to be able to mirror IIS settings onto each box from the other so that, in event of a 'server 1' crash, I can log into 'server 2' and quickly get all sites that were running on 'server 1' up and running. This isn't a simple mirror as I already have sites on 'server 2' that need to stay running, so basically I want to add the sites from 'server 1'.
I am sure I will get some comments about this, so yes, our servers can handle the increased load. I also want to stay away from discussing DNS so please let's not do that. I also realize I would need to add specific IPs to the 'server 2' network adapter and am fine with that as well so long as I can cut down on other manual tasks to get a better uptime and reduce manual errors.
Currently I am backing up databases and code on each box to the other, but as you can imagine restoring is a slow, manual and laborious process that is error prone.
I am looking for the ability to easily recover all settings that went with each site. For instance: SSL Certificates, IPs, physical path to the code for the site , bindings, handler mappings etc. I would hope to have all app pools restored too, just as they were on the other server with the correct framework version & pipeline mode.
As I understand it, the applicationHost.config houses most of this stuff. But if I am adding sites to a web server already running others I would assume that I couldn't replace this file since that would mean losing all of my current settings. I also am also not too keen on manually modding this file.
After looking around I found a release candidate of Microsoft's Web Deployment Tool. So finally, now that you have a bunch of background here comes the question:
Does anyone have any experience with quickly and (mostly) automatically adding sites to IIS 7 that is already running other sites? Has anyone done this with both "appcmd add backup" approach and Web Deployment Tool and if so what difficulties have you come up with?