Eric Woersching's Blog : IIS News Item

Video: Microsoft.com Operations Team Opens Up On Deploying IIS7 Early

EWoersch — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 21:20:00 GMT

Microsoft.com is the 5^th most trafficked site in the world, 4^th most in the US. The site is supported by roughly 80 Web servers delivering content daily to around 287M unique users via +300k concurrent connections at a rate of over 10k requests per second. Despite such a heavy load, Microsoft.com is consistently the #1 most available site on the Internet as measured by Keynote. The Operations team for MSCom had been playing with IIS7 since its early beta builds and recently finished deploying the new Web server in Windows Server 2008 Beta 3 to all its production servers.

To deploy a new operating system and new Web server into an environment like this without compromising performance or reliability is quite a feat. As the Technical Product Manager for IIS, I had to find out how they did it and more importantly, what they learned from this experience. To get this valuable info for IIS.NET, I sat down and had a chat with two of Microsoft.com’s top Operations Managers, Jeff Toewes and Chad Kraykovic. Lucky for you, the camera's were rolling.

You can view the 38 min video here (35MB) or for higher quality (296MB), here.

So what did I learn from this interview? First and foremost, I learned how the Microsoft.com Ops team goes through the pain of deploying early builds of Microsoft’s new products so customers don’t have to. In addition to that, here are some of the most important take-aways from their IIS7 deployment that every Ops guy out there should be sure to know.What tips do the Microsoft.com guys have for customers considering the upgrade to IIS7?

Come up with a plan for deployment by talking to site stakeholders early to understand their specific needs and requirements
Replay the requests in your logs using IIS7 in a pre-production lab to make sure that IIS7 works well for your specific scenarios. Tools like TinyGet and WCAT are extremely useful for this.
Test your scripts. IIS7 has an IIS6 Metabase Compatibility layer to ensure your ADSI scripts just work. Still, test all your scripts anyway.
Communicate any breaking changes to key site/content owners so they can assist with changes, particularly with respect to application configuration in IIS7 integrated mode.

So now that Microsoft.com has deployed IIS7, what benefits do they enjoy most? In this interview, they give some of the biggest highlights including:

Module based installation or being able to enable only modules required per web hosting scenario (Full Featured ASP/ ASP.NET implementation vs. Download, etc) is huge for reducing security surface area and reducing the working set by only loading necessary components. MSCom saw a 2-3% performance improvement for some parts of the site just by removing unused components.
Compatibility has been a non-issue for MSCom, apps just work on IIS7 and only one of 350 applications requiring a code change. Old scripts have also worked once the IIS6 Metabase Compatibility layer is installed.
New xml configuration files do not contain machine specific settings and can be simply copied to other servers in the site
Improved diagnostics, particularly FREB (failed event tracing) and the ability to view currently executing requests via the AppCmd.exe command-line utility have simplified troubleshooting & analysis of problem Web server pages/code
In Windows Server 2008, MSCom loves the much more useful Task Scheduler, the huge perf gains from the more scalable TCP/IP stack, as well as DFSR for content replication.

What are the most important “gotchas” that slowed down MSCom during this deployment?

User Account Control (UAC) adds security but this new security model introduced in Windows Vista forced MSCom to adjust processes to perform administrative tasks, such as running of scripts in an elevated command prompt, etc.
Module order in applicationHost.config matters because the order in which modules are listed is the order in which IIS loads them when processing requests. As an example, MSCom initially got bitten by failing to place the static file module last, behind modules for authentication and authorization.
IIS7 Integrated mode can introduce several types of errors caused by specific breaking configuration changes in web.config files (in which IIS and ASP.NET settings now coexist), specifically around ASP.NET’s <handlers> and <modules> config sections. To maximize compatibility, use the Classic ASP.NET configuration option for your Application Pools, or migrate applications using the AppCmd.exe migrate option.
To enhance IIS application security, Web server configuration is now scoped to the IIS 7 worker process that the application runs inside and as a result, MSCom could no longer query a central Metabase for physical path mappings, etc. This security win enables greater application isolation but impacted MSCOM due to some wide app dependencies on a few central physical folders.
To enable compression, you now need to specify MIME-types instead of listing all file extensions to be compressed. Thus, some work was needed to map each of our file extensions to MIME type to get compression working.
IIS Logs are in UNICODE format by default for IIS7, so log file names will start with “u_”. There are also slightly different logging behaviors, for example requests to slash used to include the default file, now it will log the explicit URL, so slash or default.aspx would be logged separately.

What other IIS7 features is MSCom most excited to roll out next?· The delegated configuration capabilities in IIS7 will significantly reduce the administrative time MSCom invests in the site because they plan to set a delegation policy that will allow site and content owners to self-manage many of the most frequently requested tasks such as setting output caching in Web config, adding new redirects, or configuring custom errors. · Shared Web server configuration will allow MSCom to touch just a few shares to make changes to a bunch of boxes. · MSCom is seriously investigating dynamic compression in IIS7 because it is now powerful enough for the bandwidth savings and shortened response times to justify the cost of additional CPU overhead. · MSCom has already seen IIS7’s enhanced output caching bring performance for some dynamic sites up from 400 rps to 3000 rps. The team probably won't turn this on globally but in many instances, this feature will significantly improve application performance

To learn more about how the Ops Team for MSCom uses IIS to host and manage one of the busiest sites in the world, check out their team blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/mscom.

Drew Robbins Breaks Down IIS7 for PHP Developers

EWoersch — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 18:47:00 GMT

In an interesting situation for a Microsoft evangelist, Drew Robbins found himself in Moscow a few weeks ago, presenting on IIS7 to developers at PHPConf. Drew doesn't speak Russian but luckily for him, there were translators. But more importantly, he was presenting on IIS7 which offers a wealth of new capabilities for managing and hosting PHP on a more reliable, scalable platform - something developers can understand in any language. (Download the latest beta of FastCGI for IIS7 or IIS6)

You can read up on Drew's reasons for a PHP developer to love IIS7 on his blog. There are also a bunch of cool pictures (like the one below) that Drew took in Moscow.

Finally, a little blast from the past, if you've been reading the IIS.NET blogs since we started the site, you may remember that this humble blogger also took some photos of Moscow, way back in June 2006.

- Eric

Where to Find TechEd 2007 Pics....

EWoersch — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 16:51:00 GMT

I've created an account on Flickr for sharing all the pictures of the IIS team at TechEd 2007 with the world.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/8728045@N06/

Go check it out, you never know, if you're at TechEd, you might just be in one of them.

Here are some highlights from Monday...

(me right before my IIS7 for ASP.NET Developers talk)

(Mai-lan and Sam preparing for their talk on Friday)

(Brian and Carlos teaching customers about IIS7)

(IIS MVP Scott Forsyth enjoying his time as staff for the IIS Booth at TechEd)

(Faith Allington delivering her great talk on IIS7 Shared Configuration)

Announcing New IIS7 Developer Center

EWoersch — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 22:11:00 GMT

Tomorrow IIS.NET will unveil a plethora of new content and features to celebrate the Beta 3 milestone of Windows Server Codename "Longhorn." One of these new site features that has been planned and developed for many months but always seemed to get postponed, is the IIS7 Developer Center. The new DevCenter will aggregate together in one place all the IIS7 articles, videos, samples and downloads that could be relevant to Web Developers.

Why does IIS.NET need a DevCenter?

IIS7 is the most developer-friendly Web server Microsoft (and perhaps anyone for that matter) has ever released. For starters, IIS7 actually ships in the client OS (Windows Vista) as a full featured Web Development server. Arbitrary restrictions in IIS 5.1 for XP (1 Site, 1 Connection) have been abolished in favor of usage restrictions that make sense – a limit of 10 simultaneous requests.

Furthermore, .NET is deeply integrated into the major systems of IIS7 including its configuration, management tools, diagnostics and processing pipeline. ASP.NET services can be used against any kind of Web content, not just ASPX. This is especially cool since with the new FastCGI module, IIS finally becomes a scalable Web serving platform for PHP and other CGI applications. Lastly, but probably most importantly, IIS7 has a modular architecture, built on public extensibility APIs and thus, is completely customizable. Developers can build new HTTP processing modules or add-ons to the management stack, easily in native OR managed code.

With all these great enhancements for developers in IIS7, it’s critical that developers can find all the learning materials they need to get up to speed quickly. The screenshot below gives a preview of what you’ll see tomorrow.

Use the navigation on the left to quickly find guidance in key areas.

The content lists distinguish items by their content types, e.g. video or article or download, etc.

What else can you expect from the new IIS7 Developer Center?

You can expect a TON more great content, that’s for sure. We’re pretty close to releasing a whole new set of IIS7 tutorials specifically geared toward real world tasks that ASP.NET developers will frequently run into. We also have a bunch of extensibility samples for Developers who want to learn how to add new functionality to IIS7. These samples will come complete with an MSI setup for quickly demoing the add-on, plus full source code in a VS project for tearing into the sample and personalizing it quickly. All code will be free use and reuse under the Microsoft Permissive license.

So in short, there is a lot of new stuff coming on IIS.NET specifically for Web developers. Check out the new Developer Center tomorrow, but make sure to come back frequently over the next 2-3 months for updates. We think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.