I have a quickly growing web farm running IIS 7 (30+ servers). All servers are identical copies of each other and all servers are physical. We update the software about once a month, and in the current process, we follow the following steps:
1) Disable server from pool on F5 load balancer. 2) Disable HTTP Keep-alives in IIS so connections drop quickly. 3) Change default directory of website to new folder containing new binaries. 4) Test server 5) Enable HTTP Keep-alives. 6) Enable server in F5 pool. 7) Move to server 2
Microsoft used to have Application Center which was abandoned a while ago. They have made a second attempt with the Web Farm Framework, but this adds as much QA time testing the release package as it saves in the deployment.
Has anyone seen a commercial off the shelf application that is tailored for managing and deploying to large web farms?
Thanks!