web site certificate issue

Question

Hello everyone,

I am working on IIS 7.0 on Windows Server 2008 Enterprise x64. I want to know if I apply for a certifcate from Verisign, is the certificate bind to domain name or bind to computer? Any comments to my 2 concerns below?

More details,

1. if the certificate is bound to computer other than domain name, then if the computer has some physical H/W issues, how could I transfer the certificate to another computer?

2. if I have a server farm of two computers, which two physical machines map to the same DNS domain name to load balance by DNS round robin name resolution. If certificate binds to machine other than domain name, how could I install the certificate on two computers to serve https from two computers?

thanks in advance, George

Answer 1

SSL certs are bound to a given domain name (or domain name pattern, in the case of wildcard SSL certs); you can move them from machine to machine trivially.

In the case of your round-robin server farm, the same SSL cert can be installed on both IIS servers -- in the eyes of IIS on each server, it is responding for the given domain, and the SSL cert will validly reflect that domain.