Free (affordable) remote web based administration for Windows/IIS?

Question

I've been using:

Webmin Free, Apache only

Cpanel Paid, Apache only I believe

Plesk Paid, supports IIS

Recently managing sites on our Windows/IIS machines have been becoming a chore. Installations, Configurations, Monitoring; have all been mostly done by hand and with a mess of scripts we've put together over time.

Does anyone know of any tools similar to the above that work in this kind of environment?

edit: we're using remote desktop now, the problem is we don't always know which web site is on which machine... yes, that's more of an internal problem. but it would be great to have a resource with administrative capability that does more than setup/configure sites, but the ftp accounts, email accounts, disk quota management, etc.

Answer 1

It's not quite what you're after (I think), but if you virtualized your Windows/IIS environments, and ran them on Microsoft Virtual Server, that would give you a remote, web-based interface for administration.

Not quite in the vein of the examples you listed, but still...

Answer 2

Remote desktop? We have over 300 servers, and our I.T. department just uses remote desktop. Maybe I missed the point of the question? You just want to manipulate IIS right? Hell, if that's all you could just use Microsoft's Admin Tools pack and connect to a server's IIS instance.

Answer 3

If you can use IIS 7.0, there are some pretty cool remoting tools.

Answer 4

I've never come across one. Never thought to ask about one either, so I'm glad I came across your question. Hope someone knows of something.

A few of the companies that I've worked for / with have had the same issues: many web servers, outdated documentation (or no documentation) and little time to get anything done.

I've usually just created scripts that export info on them to xml files. Microsoft has a decent IIS 6 scripting repository (though, you're out of luck if you're running pre Win2003): http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/scripts/iis/iis6/default.mspx?mfr=true