Best way to clone IIS settings to new server?

Question

I have a number of asp and asp.net 2.0 applications that I need to move to a new Win2003 server.

I've created a test suite to verify that different aspects are installed and configured properly, but other than exporting the IIS metabase from the two servers and comparing manually, are there any tools or techniques I'm missing?

Answer 1

What version of IIS? (This will impact the extract steps.)

You can export settings from IIS manager and import.

Answer 2

If you're doing it manually then I'd use something like BeyondCompare to make your life easier.

You could write some code using System.DirectoryService to programatically compare the two servers settings, or compare a given server against an Xml file have a look at this

Look at the sdc extensions for MSBuild they let you create websites in a msbuild file so if you can verify that you can create it correctly you can just add that to your build script.

Answer 3

To use move your application to another IIS.

• 1) First use ntbackup, and backaup the applicaton folder.
• 2) Export the application configuration to a file in IIS.
• 3) On the other server use the ntbackup command and then restore the files in the same path.
• 4) Create the application from the config file.
• 5) Adjust possible missed configurations.

• 6 That's it.

  In our company we are migrating many .NET apps from our testing servers to productive ones, and we follow this guide.

Best Regards!

Answer 4

The Microsoft Web Deployment Tool should allow you to do pretty much what you want.

From the linked web site:

The Web Deployment Tool is a tool for simplifying the deployment, management and migration of Web applications, sites and even entire servers. Developers can package a Web site, automatically including content, configuration, certificates and databases. These packages can be directly deployed to a server or packaged and shared with others. IT Professionals can enable developers to deploy these packages to a server and delegate access to non-admins. IT Professionals can also use the tool in their infrastructure to synchronize servers easily on both IIS 6.0 and IIS 7.0, or even to accomplish a migration from IIS 6.0 to IIS 7.0.

When it comes to metabase edits, it allows you to easily get a list of all settings your site is dependent on, and sync these to the target server (complete with a handy 'what if' mode).