BillS IIS Blog : Migration

IIS’ Web Deployment Tool Beta 2 Released

bills — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 13:23:29 GMT

The Web Deployment team had a big ‘coming out’ party yesterday at the PDC and announced immediate availability of a new Beta of the Microsoft Web Deployment Tool.

MS Deploy - Fundamentals

If you aren’t familiar with this tool yet, you’re going to want to take the time to browse the documents and give it a try. It is one of the fundamental building blocks that IIS will be building on the next several years. In it’s current beta form, it can be used to:

Migrate entire servers or individual sites from one machine to another (IIS6 –> IIS7)
Sync Servers, Sites, and Applications (IIS6 –> IIS6, and IIS7 –> IIS7)
Create offline packages that can be used as backups, version control, and deployment units

New Beta Features

The new beta has several new and exciting features you’ll want to check out. The new release includes an all-new IIS Manager extension that enables you to create, and install packages from within IIS Manager. Imagine being able to right click on your Web site, create an offline ‘package’ of the site and all of it’s configuration, dependencies, etc., and then roll it out over any number of servers, locally or remote!

The beta also provides support for ‘delegated’ publishing, which enables Administrators to grant control to developers and Web site owners to do the packaging and publishing without being a machine administrator. This is going to be a huge boon for Shared Hosters especially, allowing richer application publishing than ever before. DiscountASP.net, one of our close hosting partners, is offering 2000 free accounts as part of a limited Beta which allows you to try out this new functionality – sign-up today, availability is limited.

The new beta also includes support for SQL Server, enabling you to include SQL databases (Schema + Data) as part of your deployment, both live server <-> sync as well as offline packaging!

And lots of bug fixes, performance improvements, etc. Please note: the last beta was released as a “GoLive” release, which means we felt it was ready for production use. This Beta includes so many new features for the first time that we have not marked it as “GoLive”. The migration and sync features should work as well, if not better than the previous release, but the new features are still under testing and we need your feedback to feel confident they are ready.

Visual Studio 10 Integration!

The team also announced integration with Visual Web Developer Express as part of the upcoming Visual Studio 10 release which will enable developers to create application packages at development/build time, which can then be deployed directly from within VS (one-click publishing to remote servers!) or offline as part of a staging process. Developers and IT Pros can rejoice with that one: no more 10-page instruction-custom-script-manual-deployments, do it all automatically with a perfectly repeatable deployment package created within VS using MSDeploy!

Thanks!

This beta release is a huge next step for MS Deploy, and the team worked very hard (including some late nights and weekends :) to get it ready for PDC. Please give it a try and help us make it better by giving us feedback! Some important links:

Web Deployment Tool forum: http://forums.iis.net/1144.aspx
Web Deployment Team blog: http://blogs.iis.net/msdeploy/

Downloads

x86 version: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=109365
x64 version: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=109366

Quick Starts:

1. Web Deployment Tool Overview (overview of the features)

2. Installing the Web Deployment Tool (installation and remote service options)

3. Create a Package (creating a package including content, databases and more)
4. Install a Package (deploying the package to a local or remote machine)

5. Configure the Delegation Service (enable deployment to an IIS 7.0 server)

More quick guides can be found at the Web Deployment Tool main page.

How to Migrate from IIS 6 to IIS 7

bills — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 16:29:00 GMT

With so many cool new capabilities in IIS7, and even more new features coming out all the time, it's no wonder you want to move to IIS7. But you work for The Man, and everyone knows The Man wants ROI. He can't just let you go willy-nilly and adopt every cool new technology that hits the street. After all, He has a business to run. And that business currently runs on IIS 6. And he's paid you a lot of money (ok, not that much) to write the code, test the apps, deploy the servers, and keep those HTML pumping machines up and running 24x7x365. And things are running well, right? When was the last time you had to worry about metabase corruption? Or been forced to run IISRESET? Or been paged in the middle of the night with some glorious server 500 error and (of course) the developer who wrote the code is no where to be found?

Dear reader, I know your plight. I've been there before. I work for The Man too. And while he is a kinder, gentler boss as he moves into his old age (>30s!), he expects results.

This post is broken into three parts. 1) Sell the Boss 2) Get the Goods 3) Be the Hero (and migrate those servers!). If you're already sold on IIS7, jump to section 2 and 3 for instructions on how to actually migrate those IIS6 servers to IIS7 in a quick and painless way.

Sell the Boss

So how do you sell The Man on moving to IIS7? Here is my quick top 10 list, email me if you need more help:

IIS7 is faster and more efficient than any other version of IIS.
With IIS7 you can m anage whole Web farms from one place
IIS7 allows you to delegate management workload with site owners. Site owners can also remotely manage their sites and applications over HTTPS from Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Server 2008. IIS7's XCopy deployment model even allows you to deploy applications preconfigured!
IIS7 is much more flexible and customizable than before, allowing you to fine tune the server (including server core!) to minimize security footprint and downtime due to patching.
You can save loads of time by automating more tasks with the interface that is right for you.
If you do run into issues, IIS7 makes it easy to resolve site issues faster, minimizing down time due to that bone headed developer on your staff.
IIS7 includes built-in support for PHP, making it the best Web server for both Open Source languages and .NET. Why would you want to deploy, manage, patch and troubleshoot that Linux+Apache server to support those PHP apps, when you can just use Windows!?
IIS7 makes it easy to publish content securely over FTP/SSL or WebDAV!
Windows and IIS7 are cheaper than ever with the new Windows Web 2008 product. This version of Windows is super inexpensive and supports all the great features of IIS, Sharepoint, SQL, Windows Media server and more for Internet facing sites!
And as if that isn't enough, IIS7 is getting better every day with new IIS7 Extensions like built-in progressive streaming and playlist support for media content, URL Rewrite capabilities, integrated database management, powershell support, and much much more.

Get the Goods

If your company already has access to Windows Server 2008, you've paid all the money you'll ever need to pay in order to get IIS7 up and running. Have a cheap boss who wants to see the results first? Get the Windows Server 2008 trial edition which lets you try before you buy. I recommend the Windows Web Server 2008 for Internet facing sites, or Standard server for intranet ones. Note: IIS7 also ships with Windows Vista, which you can use for development and testing of your applications.

Now that you've got IIS7, it's time to get the migration tool (x86) and (x64). Ok, it is a WHOLE LOT MORE than just a migration tool, but this article is about migrating, and the Microsoft Web Deployment tool was built specifically with migration from IIS6 to IIS7 in mind. Download it now, use it to not only migrate from IIS6 to IIS7, but to archive (snapshot) your entire site/server (including configuration, content, certificates, etc.). You can also use it to do live synchronization of your IIS6 or IIS7 sites or servers in a web farm. MS Deploy is going to be your new best friend, be nice to it.

Be the Hero (and migrate those servers!)

This step is documented very nicely in the learn.iis.net portal under deployment, but I'll shamelessly steal from there to make your life easier. If things don't work (any longer), you might want to check the official documentation for the latest updates, or see Troubleshooting MS Deploy. This section assumes you've already downloaded MS Deploy and have installed it successfully. (see "Get the Goods")

Part 1 - View dependencies of the source

1. Get the dependencies of the web site by running the following command:

msdeploy -verb:getDependencies -source:metakey=lm/w3svc/1

2. Review the output of the dependencies and look for any script maps or installed components in use by the site. For example, if Windows Authentication is in use by the web site, you will see <dependency name="WindowsAuthentication" />.

3. If your site is inheriting any script maps, these will not be listed in the dependencies and you should also review the script maps for your site manually.

4. Compile a list of the components needed on the destination.

For detailed steps on analyzing the output of getDependencies, see Viewing Dependencies of a Web site.

Part 2 - Configure the target or destination machine

1. Review the list of dependencies and install them on the destination server.

For example, let’s assume you had the following in use for your web site:

• ASP.NET

• Windows Authentication

• Anonymous Authentication

Based on analyzing your dependencies, you would install those components and modules.

Part 3 – To migrate the site to the source server

1. Always make a backup of the destination server. Even if you are just testing, it allows you to easily restore the state of your server. Run the following command to backup an IIS 7.0 server:

%windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd add backup “PreMsDeploy”

2. Run the following command on the destination server to take an archive of the server for migration:

msdeploy -verb:sync -source:metakey=lm/w3svc/1 -dest:archivedir=c:\site1archive

3. Run the following command on the destination server to validate what would happen if a migrate was run:

msdeploy -verb:migrate -source:archivedir=c:\site1archive -dest:metakey=lm/w3svc/1 -whatif > msdeploymigrate.log

Note: If you don't wish to sync from an archive, you can sync using the remote service. Specify computerName with the name of your server, such as Server1. If you are not running on the default port and URL, you need to specify the full URL, such as http://Server1:8080/msdeploy. For example, change the source to
source:metakey=lm/w3svc/1,computerName=server1

3. After verifying the output, run the same command again without the whatif flag:

msdeploy -verb:migrate -source:archivedir=c:\site1archive -dest:metakey=lm/w3svc/1 -whatif > msdeploymigrate.log

Note: If you don't wish to sync from an archive, you can sync using the remote service. Specify computerName with the name of your server, such as Server1. If you are not running on the default port and URL, you need to specify the full URL, such as http://Server1:8080/msdeploy. For example, change the dest to
dest:metakey=lm/w3svc/1,computerName=server1

You are now done migrating your site. To verify, test browsing to the web site on the destination server. For troubleshooting help, see Troubleshooting MS Deploy.