Harsh Mittal's Blog

Scaling up IIS Server

harshmittal — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 20:40:00 GMT

When it comes to the scalability of web servers, first thing customers think about is scale out. While scale out is great option, there are many scenarios which can benefit from scale up. In Windows Server 2012, IIS team has done a good amount of work to scale up IIS server on latest industry standard hardware.

IIS team, along with HP and Microsoft EEC has recently published a case study on how IIS 8.0 performs on HP Proliant DL980, an 8 socket, 80 core machine. Please check out http://www.iis.net/learn/get-started/case-studies/case-study-iis-80-scaling-on-an-hp-proliant-dl980-g7-8-processor-socket-system

Announcing Application Request Router 3.0 Beta!

harshmittal — Fri, 07 Dec 2012 01:02:00 GMT

We are happy to announce that we have just released the Beta version for ARR 3.0. Click here to install ARR v3 beta using Microsoft Web Platform Installer.

You can also download the x86 or x64 versions from Microsoft download center for manual install. Please follow How to install ARR without WebPI blog for installation instructions.

WebSocket support is the main highlight for this release. V3 also supports retries of URL health check. Apart from these features, ARRv3 also includes few bug-fixes.

WebSockets support in ARR:

Windows Server 2012 has added support for WebSockets in IIS 8.0. This allowed customers to deploy WebSocket applications on IIS server opening door for many interesting applications. Many customers use ARR in conjunction with IIS for its L7 aware routing and software load balancing capabilities. Websockets require special handling by L7 proxies and that’s why ARRv2.5 is not capable of routing WebSocket requests.

We have added WebSocket support to ARRv3, now ARR can distinguish WebSocket requests from normal HTTP requests and can handle them adequately.

In order to use ARR Websocket features, ARRv3 needs to be installed on Windows Server 2012 and install IIS Websockets module using following instructions:

Step by Step Instructions

To enable support for the WebSocket Protocol on Windows Server 2012, use the following steps:

Open Server Manager.
Under the Manage menu, click Add Roles and Features.
Select Role-based or Feature-based Installation, and then click Next.
Select the appropriate server, (your local server is selected by default), and then click Next.
Expand Web Server (IIS) in the Roles tree, then expand Web Server, and then expand Application Development.
Select WebSocket Protocol, and then click Next.
If no additional features are needed, click Next.
Click Install.
When the installation completes, click Close to exit the wizard.

Once WebSocket module is installed, ARR server is ready to handle WebSocket traffic. This does not require any special configuration on ARR server.

ARR load balances WebSocket connections by load balancing first HTTP connect request according to configured WebSocket algorithm.

ARR supports both plain (ws://) and secure WebSocket (wss://) requests and it can also provide SSL offloading for WSS requests.

Retries for URL health Monitoring-

ARR provides URL health test for monitoring health of backend Web Servers. ARR periodically checks for health test URL and marks web server unhealthy when URL test fails. It also stops sending further traffic to that web server while it’s unhealthy. While it’s a very useful feature, it can be problematic in case Web Server is experiencing transient failure. Previous versions of ARR did not provide retry mechanism for health check. ARRv3 retries the URL health test 3 times by default before marking server unhealthy. This retry count value can be configured by changing retriesBeforeFail attribute under healthCheck element in ApplicationHost.config file of ARR server.

Below is relevant section of schema:

</element>

Summary.

We are excited about ARR 3.0 and thrilled to be able to get the beta in your hands. The engineering team is eagerly looking forward to hearing your feedback which will help us continue improving ARR

Announcing Web Deploy 3.0 RTW

harshmittal — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 15:34:00 GMT

It’s my pleasure to announce the final release of “Microsoft Web Deploy 3.0”. Web Deploy simplifies the deployment of Web applications and Web sites to IIS servers. It also, facilitates migration of IIS servers from older version to newer versions.

If you are new to Web Deploy, Please read our Introduction to Web Deploy tutorial. Web Deploy 3.0 can be installled using these links x86/x64. More details on installation can be found in Installing & Configuring Web Deploy tutorial. Previous Web Deploy 3.0 versions will be upgrade to the RTW version, and this V3 will continue to live side-by-side with Web Deploy 2.0 & Web Deploy 1.1.

Here's a rundown of new features in Web Deploy 3.0:

Deployment & Migration to IIS8

If you are impressed with cool new features of IIS8 and Windows Server 2012 and looking for migration strategy from your existing IIS Servers, Web Deploy 3.0 fully supports migrating to IIS8 from IIS 6, IIS7 and IIS7.5. Please follow our documentation walkthrough on migration Synchronize IIS Migrate a Web Site from IIS6.0 to IIS7 and above Web Deployment experience for IIS8 is no different than publishing to IIS7, you can learn more about publishing in our tutorial "Testing Web Deploy Publishing from Visual Studio 2010 and WebMatrix." Web Deploy ships with Visual Studio and Web Matrix and is the default web publishing tool for these.

Publishing to Microsoft Azure Websites

Web Deploy 3.0 supports deploying websites to Microsoft’s new Azure Websites offering. You can either directly publish from Visual Studio/WebMatrix or use Web Deploy cmdline for same.

Incremental Database Publishing using Data Tier Application (DAC) framework

We have added support for incremental data sync and SQL Azure download using SQL DACPAC framework. More details can be found here.

Automatic Backup

One of the common feedback we received that customers often make mistakes while publishing changes to websites. This is especially true for amateur developers and small business owners. It is very hard to recover from these mistakes. In Web Deploy V3 we are introducing new feature "Automatic Backup" which will allow server administrators to configure servers in such a way that each publish will automatically generate a backup and store it on server. If you need to roll back or go to a previous version, you will be able to do it without involving server administrator. You can also manually trigger the backup using msdeploy cmdline.You can learn more about this feature in our "Automatic Backups" Tutorial.

PowerShell Cmdlets

Web Deploy command line is very versatile which also makes it equally complex. Based on your feedback, team has invested into PowerShell Cmdlets for common Web Deploy tasks. We are releasing more than 20 PowerShell Cmdlets in this release. Powershell cmdlets includes help description as part of cmdlets themselves. More details are provided in "PowerShell Cmdlets" tutorial.

Improved Parameterization

Web Deploy supports parameterization of publish settings during deployment time. To learn more read Web Deploy parameterization.

Extend the current xml parameterization beyond attribute value replacements to a more complete xml modification story by allowing addition/deletion/replacement of new elements.
Accept the replacement data for parameters to come from the server, from the package itself or from the source.

More details can be found here

Others

Apart from above we have added many small improvements in our latest version. Please follow these links for more information.

Summary

We are excited about Web Deploy 3.0 and thrilled to be able to get the RTW in your hands. The engineering team is eagerly looking forward to hearing your feedback which will help us continue improving Web Deploy.