How do I setup WebDeploy on Windows 2003 / IIS6?

Question

Webdeploy is an alternative to WebDav, FTP, and FrontPage extensions. It also acts as an alternative to DFS for replicating websites. I found instructions for configuring Windows 2008, but I'm unclear how to set up 2003 especially when multiple sites / IP Addresses are present.

Answer 1

I use WebDeploy (MSDeploy) on 2003 servers to ensure content, IP addresses, certificates, etc remain the same across a MS NLB cluster. I also created a batch file to automate most of the different functions based on what I want to do (Full Server replication, single website, content only). Here are my notes on using the tool that I posted on my company's internal blog:

MSDeploy (http://www.iis.net/download/webdeploy) is a tool developed by Microsoft to make migrating, deploying, copying, and backing up websites easier. It was developed for IIS 7, but most features work in IIS 6. It can also be used to move a website from IIS 6 to 7 although I have not tested this. Some things to keep in mind when using MSDeploy are:

• MSDeploy must be installed on both source and destination servers
• The “Web Deployment Agent Service” must be running on both source and destination servers
• Application Pools for the website must be created on the destination server before using MSDeploy or it will fail. I think this is fixed in IIS 7, but I am not 100% sure
• When deploying a website, MSDeploy will attempt to put the files in exactly the same path on the destination server. If the path doesn’t exist on the destination server (like if the source path is D:\website and the destination server doesn’t have a D: drive it will fail)
• The migrated website will have the exact same configuration as it did on the source IIS server. Some settings you might want to change after the move/copy are the website IP address and home directory path. You will need to make those changes manually on the destination server.
• The metabase keys will need to be edited on a per-server basis since they are unique for each server (unless you created the sites using MSDeploy, then it uses the same key string across servers). As more and more sites get deployed with MSDeploy, the key strings will become universal for all servers since the metabase keys will be the same on all servers.

Answer 2

It is possible to install Web Deploy Tool 1.1 on Windows 2003 for IIS6. Generally this tool is used for synchronization between remote/local sources. You can refer to the following article about how to use Web Deploy Tool 1.1 on Windows Server 2003:

Synchronize IIS 6.0 Web Sites
http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/445/synchronize-iis-60-web-sites/

However, it's not possible to use this tool to enable publishing from Visual Studio 2010 to the webserver. The reason is that this method relies on ‘Web Management Service’, which is newly introduced in IIS 7. This service can be used when there are some users delegated to manage certain sites or applications on the server. However, this service does not exist on Windows Server 2003.

IIS Web Management Service (WMSvc):
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc735010(WS.10).aspx