Search results matching tag 'IIS7'

IIS URL Rewrite – rewriting non-www to www

Anonymous — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 01:55:32 GMT

If you’re using IIS 7.0 (or 7.5), URL Rewrite is a valuable tool, well worth installing and using.

One common use of URL Rewrite is redirecting http://domain.com to http://www.domain.com. Many people are doing this for search engine optimization (SEO) so that search engines only see the one site, rather than two sites. The goal is to set a permanent 301 redirect.

You can download URL Rewrite from http://www.iis.net/expand/URLRewrite. For this walkthrough and screenshots I’ll use URL Rewrite 2.0 RC1, but everything that I’ll cover also works for version 1.0 and 1.1.

URL Rewrite works at the global level, or site level (or application level for that matter). Where you apply it is really up to how you manage your server. Either will work for a domain name redirect like this.

You can choose to create the rules using IIS Manager, or using a text editor and updating web.config directly. I’ll show both, starting with IIS Manager.

Let’s get started. First, open IIS Manager and double-click on the “URL Rewrite” icon.

Next, click on “Add Rules…” from the Actions pane.

Here you’ll have a choice from a few wizard options, and with URL Rewrite 2.0 you can also create outbound rules. Create a Blank rule (inbound rules).

Give your rule a good friendly “Name”. I’ll call mine “Redirect domain.com to www”.

In the “Using” dropdown box you can choose between Regular Expressions and Wildcards. Use wildcards if you aren’t familiar with regular expressions since they are much more intuitive. However, if you later need to create more complex rules, regex may be necessary.

For this demo select Wildcards. However, I’ll include instructions for those wanting to use regular expressions.

Enter * for the “Pattern”. That means anything qualifies. We’ll use a condition later instead of matching to the URL. (for Regular Expressions, use .*).

Now expand the “Conditions” section and click “Add”. In the “Add Condition” dialogue enter the following:

Condition input:	{HTTP_HOST}
Check if input string:	Matches the Pattern
Pattern:	domain.com (for regex, enter ^domain.com$)
Ignore case:	checked

Click OK.

Finally, it’s time to set the Action.

In the Action section make sure that the “Action Type” is set to Redirect.

For the “Action Properties”, enter http://www.domain.com/{R:0}. The {R:0} retains the existing URL so if someone typed something like http://domain.com/aboutus it would retain the aboutus as it adds the www.

Be sure that the “Append query string” remains checked so that the querystring part is also retained.

Also, be sure that the “Redirect Type” is set to Permanent (301), which is what the search engines like. This tells the search engines to do a permanent redirect, use the new location and ignore the previous location.

Finally, Apply the rule and test!

Using a Text Editor

You can also create this rule manually by adding the following to your site’s web.config (or applicationHost.config if you set this at the server level).

In the <system.webServer> section of your web.config, add the following:

Wildcards

     <rewrite>

        <rules>

            <rule name="Redirect domain.com to www" patternSyntax="Wildcard" stopProcessing="true">

                <match url="*" />

                <conditions>

                    <add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="domain.com" />

                </conditions>

                <action type="Redirect" url="http://www.domain.com/{R:0}" />

            </rule>

        </rules>

    </rewrite>

Save and you should be set.

Or, if you prefer Regular Expressions, use this instead:

Regular Expressions

    <rewrite>

        <rules>

            <rule name="Redirect domain.com to www" patternSyntax="ECMAScript" stopProcessing="true">

                <match url=".*" />

                <conditions>

                    <add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="^domain.com$" />

                </conditions>

                <action type="Redirect" url="http://www.domain.com/{R:0}" />

            </rule>

        </rules>

    </rewrite>

This is just the start to great SEO, but it’s a common step and one that I hope you find helpful.

Lots of new software for IIS, ASP.NET, AJAX and PHP this week

bills — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 18:13:00 GMT

Wow, what a week of innovation for the Microsoft Web Platform. This week we released a ton of new software which, if you haven’t already, you’ve got to check out. Here is a quick overview:

IIS Search Engine Optimization v1 final release!

The IIS team shipped the final release of IIS SEO toolkit which makes it easier to optimize your Website for search engines. It acts like a mini-search engine on your computer, scans your site and then provides useful tips for how to improve the relevance of your site to search engines. This tool is now out of beta and available for download through Web PI.

ASP.NET MVC 2 beta!

The ASP.NET team has been hard at work on the second release of MVC, which is now available to beta test. Phil has a great blog post on the release with links to the download page, readme notes and the source code. There are a bunch of new features in MVC 2 including AsyncController, expression based helpers, improvements with client validation, all new areas support, and more. Read more on Phil’s blog.

ASP.NET AJAX Library beta!

The ASP.NET AJAX team also has some exciting news with the release of the ASP.NET AJAX Library beta. James has a terrific blog post with the news This is the first project accepted into the new CodePlex Foundation! (more on that later) The ASP.NET AJAX Library has a new portal at www.asp.net/ajaxlibrary with tutorials, samples, and more. Read James’ post about the news and check it out!

IIS Application Request Router 2 final release!

The IIS team also released the final version of the IIS Application Request Router v2. This is a super powerful module that provides routing and load balancing capabilities for Windows and IIS. It makes it easy to create and manage an entire cluster of Web servers. Mai-lan has a lot of info on the release in her blog post and you can download ARR v2 using Web PI today.

PHP WinCache module final release - faster PHP on Windows!

The PHP team announced today the final release of the Windows Cache Extension for PHP, or WinCache for short, which makes PHP run much, much faster on Windows. The iBuildings guys released a benchmark showing how the WinCache extension speeds up PHP by as much as 2x over standard PHP. The other exciting part of this announcement is that the sources for the extension are now available under an open source BSD license and the source code is maintained and host on http://pecl.php.net/packages/wincache/ If you install PHP using Web PI, you automatically get WinCache.

Windows Cache Extension for PHP (aka, “WinCache”) 1.0 General Availability Today

mailant — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 21:21:59 GMT

Today we announce the general availability of the Windows Cache Extension for PHP 1.0 (affectionately known as “WinCache”), which is an open source built-for-Windows caching extension to the PHP engine. You can view, contribute and download the source code for WinCache at the PHP repository for extensions (http://pecl.php.net/package/WinCache), where we have joined other Linux-based PHP caches.

I wanted to thank Pierre Joye for his invaluable help in helping connect the IIS product team with PECL, and for agreeing to host the WinCache binaries on http://windows.php.net.

We cordially invite the PHP development community to join us in development of this caching extension for PHP on Windows. We already have gotten one contribution from the community in our pre-release mode and are very excited to have others join this new PHP on Windows caching community. The IIS team at Microsoft is going to start off the v2.0 development by adding a user cache and lazy class loading to the opcode cache, file cache, and relative file cache that is available today in WinCache 1.0.

I am proud of the WinCache project for many reasons, including:

WinCache solves a real customer problem. WinCache provides a Windows PHP caching extension that is free and part of the PECL extension library, and can accelerate the performance of all PHP applications on Windows.
WinCache is our first big open source contribution to the PHP on Windows community. The IIS team has made several code contributions (big fixes) to the PHP 5.3 release, as well as provided support for the Windows Installer for PHP community (John Mertic rocks) and the Windows documentation on the PHP website. This WinCache release is a substantial amount of code that we are open sourcing on the PECL extension library. We hope others join this new community to help accelerate PHP performance on Windows.
WinCache represents a series of “firsts” for Microsoft…first time Microsoft has contributed to the PECL repository, first Windows-based PHP cache, first joint community project between Microsoft and the PHP development community, first BSD license for the IIS team….and the list goes on. The WinCache feature team of Ruslan, Kanwal and Don are incredibly passionate about PHP on Windows, respond to their blog and forum comments, and lurk on the PHP on Windows mailing list if you want to connect with them.

Here’s some more information about WinCache.

What is WinCache?

WinCache is actually a collection of three caches:

An opcode file cache, just like the one that APC provides to cache compiled PHP code
A file cache to help when your PHP scripts run on remote servers. This is net new functionality that is not available in other caching modules at the time of this blog.
A relative file cache to cache relative file paths for when you are running PHP scripts on remote servers.

WinCache itself was designed, written, and tested by the IIS engineering team that also brings you FastCGI, the core PHP hosting platform in IIS. We are planning to add more caches to WinCache in 2010.

What is the WinCache license?

WinCache is licensed under BSD.

How do I get WinCache?

You can compile WinCache as part of your PHP compilation from the PECL library.

If you download any PHP application from Web Platform Installer and/or the Windows Web Application Gallery (WordPress, Moodle, SilverStripe, SugarCRM, Acquia Drupal, Gallery 2, and any other new PHP app in the Web App Gallery), you will automatically get WinCache installed on your IIS computer as part of the PHP application install. We want to make sure that your PHP application deployment and hosting experience is great on Windows.

How do I learn more about WinCache?

You can learn more about WinCache’s features and how to get started on the http://php.iis.net community site. You can also check out the blogs for the feature team (Kanwal, Ruslan, Don) or visit the community forum which is supported by the feature team and WinCache community.

How much faster is it to run WinCache with my PHP application?

We are seeing quite a significant increase in performance. But don’t take our word for it. Check out the perspective of other members of the PHP developer community:

Cal Evans’ benchmark results
TechPortal at iBuildings.com benchmark results

We hope that others try WinCache and publish their findings as well.

Why is Microsoft investing in making PHP run faster?

IIS is all about making apps run at their finest on IIS. We have a built-in advantage with ASP.NET apps because we can walk down the hallway in our building here in the Seattle area to talk to the ASP.NET team about how to make the ASP.NET on IIS experience better. But we also care deeply about the PHP experience on IIS – there are some amazing applications like WordPress and Drupal that form the foundation of many a Web site on the Internet. We are committed to making those applications run great on Windows, which is the primary motivation for our WinCache project.

How do I learn more about WinCache?

To learn more about WinCache, you can check out:

The PECL documentation on WinCache
The PHP on Windows feature team (Kanwal, Ruslan, and Don) blogs
The WinCache community forum
The IIS.NET documentation on WinCache
The source code of WinCache on PECL, licensed under BSD
How to file bugs on WinCache in PECL

Thanks,

Mai-lan

IIS SEO Toolkit 1.0 Final Release Available Today

mailant — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 23:06:19 GMT

Today, IIS launched the IIS SEO Toolkit 1.0, a free, fully supported extension to IIS7 that makes it easy for you to build and maintain Web sites optimized for search engines and site quality. In a world where thousands of new Web sites appear on the Internet every month, it is more important than ever to provide a Web destination that is easily discoverable by search engines. Users have a tremendous amount of choice on Web sites today, and poor site quality, like slow response time and broken links, will end up costing you site visitors and visits. Developers and site administrators can download the IIS SEO Toolkit today using Web Platform Installer or directly from the Microsoft Download Center, and start optimizing any Web sites on Windows (ASP.NET, HTML, ASP, or PHP).

The IIS SEO Toolkit installs and runs on IIS 7.x, which is the Microsoft Web server shipped as part of Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Vista and Windows 7.

If you are a site administrator, you will love using the IIS SEO toolkit because you don’t have to write code to improve your Web site’s “searchability” by Bing, Google and other Web sites, and you can directly impact the quality of your Web site. You can find and fix-up site issues by running reports that:

analyze everything from broken links to load times on Web pages
discover common browsing paths through your Web site taken by customers
duplicate files and other issues with site quality

If you are a developer, you will be interested in the IIS SEO toolkit because it can simplify your development process for new Web sites and help you maintain existing sites. You can use the same Web server administration console that you use for managing your site to:

run reports to report on broken links across your Web site
control robots crawling behavior on your site
build custom site analysis reports for site administrators
add and edit sitemaps and sitemap indices

One of the most powerful features in the IIS SEO toolkit is the built-in site analyzer that lets you run detailed reports on web sites that are hosted on external Web sites or your localhost environment.

The “dashboard” for the Site Analysis Report gives you a summary of violations and other built-in reports like pages with the most violations, or sort by violation categories or levels.

If you want to take a different “view” of your Web site, you can look at your site by content, performance or links. The query builder that comes with the Site Analysis tool lets you set up custom queries to get a detailed view of the content you care about. In this example below, you can see all the links to images on your site.

The IIS SEO toolkit is part of the IIS7 mission to provide the best Web application hosting platform for developers and administrators. We hope you enjoy using this extension and look forward to hearing your suggestions in our SEO Toolkit forum!

For more information, check out these sources:

Carlos’ blogs with many a post on the SEO toolkit
The public forum, monitored by the IIS product team, for SEO Toolkit
The SEO Toolkit extension page with a summary of features and links to more detailed articles

Delegate Application Creation for Non-Admininistrator accounts

krolson — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 18:37:00 GMT

The Web Deployment Tool provides a way to delegate application creation to non-Administrator Windows users or IIS users. This blog covers how to configure this particular delegated setting. If you have not yet set up some users, or are not familiar with remote administration, I highly recommend going through this walkthrough: http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/159/configuring-remote-administration-and-feature-delegation-in-iis-70/ before trying out these steps.

Server Admin Steps

1. Install the Web Deployment Tool (MSDeploy)

Use the Web Platform Installer (can be found here: http://www.microsoft.com/web/downloads/platform.aspx)
Run and choose Web Deployment Tool 1.0 and click Install. This will also pull in any dependencies you don’t already have on your system.

NOTE: This might take a while if you are missing a lot of dependencies (particularly the Windows Installer 4.5 – as this may require a restart)

2. Launch Inetmgr

Click Start and type inetmgr. Press Enter.

3. Open Management Service Delegation feature UI

Select the server node and double-click the Management Service Delegation icon (in the Management group)

NOTE: if you see these warnings:

This means you need to do 2 things (but they may be done after setting up rules, if you prefer):

Start WMSvc with remote connections allowed
Set up some IIS Manager Permissions.

There is information about doing this here: http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/159/configuring-remote-administration-and-feature-delegation-in-iis-70/

4. Make a rule to allow marking folders as applications

Click the Add Rule… task in the Actions pane

Choose the Mark Folders as Applications template and click OK

Set the Run-As identity to an account that has write permission to applicationHost.config (such as an Administrator account)
Click Set button under Specify credentials:

Enter user credentials

Click OK

Click OK to finish creation of the rule

5. Add a user to the rule

Note: this dialog will pop up automatically when you create the rule, but you can add users at any time by selecting the rule and clicking the “Add User to Rule…” task

Add a specific Windows user, user group or IIS User. You may also make this rule for all users (*) and the {userScope} path will limit each user to the specific sites/apps they have IIS Manager Permissions for – see section Configure IIS Manager Permissions for a Site or an Application here for more information on this step http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/159/configuring-remote-administration-and-feature-delegation-in-iis-70/ )

Click OK

6. Add additional rules if you want to allow additional user actions (such as the ability to add content, set ACLs, or access databases) - see last section on this page.

Note – this rule ONLY allows the users to right-click an existing folder and mark it as an application – other rules are probably desired. See the bottom of this article for some common rules.

Client (non-Admin) steps

1. Launch inetmgr

Note: this may be done either from a remote computer or locally. If remote, the remote computer must also have MSDeploy installed in order to use the MSDeploy UI features.

2. Connect to the user’s site (or app)

Right-click on Start Page and choose the Connect to a Site… option

Type in the server name and site name – click Next

Type in user credentials and click Next

You should get to a “Created a new connection successfully.” screen. Click Finish.

3. Expand the site node

4. Right-click a folder

Note: if you do NOT see the Deploy option, then most likely issues are:

MSDeploy UI component is not installed on the computer
There are no Management Service Delegation rules
This user has not been added to any Management Service Delegation rules

5. Select the Deploy > Convert to Application option

Note: other options would appear under Deploy if other rules were specified, such as Delete Folder and Content or Recycle. See the Common Rules section below for a few basic rules to try out.

6. Notice that the folder has now marked as an application (you can tell by the updated icon in the tree view)

Some Common Rules to Get Started

This shows the values for some common rules as they would appear in the administration.config file (%windir%\System32\inetsrv\config\administration.config). The rule just created for createApp has been bolded:

<system.webServer>
            <management>
                <delegation>
                    
                    <rule enabled="true" providers="contentPath, iisApp" actions="*" path="{userScope}" pathType="PathPrefix">
                        <runAs identityType="CurrentUser" />
                        <permissions>
                            <user name="*" isRole="false" accessType="Allow" />
                        </permissions>
                    </rule>
                    <!—This is the “Set Permissions for Applications” rule, with all the template defaults. It allows users to set ACLs to locations they have IIS Manager Permissions for AND appropriate ACLs on the parent physical directories-->
                    <rule enabled="true" providers="setAcl" actions="*" path="{userScope}" pathType="PathPrefix">
                        <runAs identityType="CurrentUser" />
                        <permissions>
                            <user name="*" isRole="false" accessType="Allow" />
                        </permissions>
                    </rule>
                    <!—This is the “Mark Folders as Applications” rule, using the template defaults. The runAs identity was set to a local Administrator account to allow non-administrators to mark folders as applications if they are in a path the user has IIS Manager Permissions for. This rule was the focus of the walkthrough above. -->
                   <rule enabled="true" providers="createApp" actions="*" path="{userScope}" pathType="PathPrefix">
                        <runAs identityType="SpecificUser" userName="Administrator" password="[enc:RsaProtectedConfigurationProvider:jAAAAAECAAADZgAAAKQAAKv+vnsskEdvc7c3Q2tcaJGVbvKW0urtCC8QayxZfYyGVjKrxQKQTob7T5z7ESM/3Zm0mPhIut033tWpyNJ+As4N8H5Wh/w31327eaxe+C6NLK2zmHY978A0aHpqcafcZ7K7YIaGGEem/Up0xa2Jf/LXJt77vLJUkumwGOlO3Dw9NGYGIyj8zk6lHsFQPoU0SHykWhrnMCp12uzFCUN4fYw=:enc]" />
                        <permissions>
                            <user name="*" isRole="false" accessType="Allow" />
                        </permissions>
                    </rule>
                 </delegation>
            </management>
        </system.webServer>

Why do all these rules use {userScope} for the default path?

This makes your job easier by automatically limiting the users to areas you’ve given them permission to using IIS Manager Permissions – which are stored in the same administration.config file. You can see in this sample administration.config section below that both a Windows user (A_Windows_User) and an IIS user (An_IIS_User) are authorized to access Default Web Site – so the {userScope} in the above rules would limit them to altering items under Default Web Site. (Note that for reading/writing content under Default Web Site these accounts will also require you to grant ACLs on Default Web Site’s physical directory. There’s some more information on how to do this here: http://blogs.iis.net/krolson/archive/2009/11/04/using-iis-manager-accounts-for-web-deployment-tool-msdeploy-delegation.aspx - for Windows users just use the user name instead of Local Service)

<system.webServer>
<management>

Download a powerful load balancer and caching solution free on Windows Server 2008 or later with Application Request Routing (ARR) 2.0

mailant — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 19:01:00 GMT

I am very pleased to announce the final release of Application Request Routing (ARR) 2.0, which provides a powerful load balancer and caching solution for free download onto Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2008 R2. As with all the IIS Web server extensions, ARR is built by the same engineering team that brings you the IIS Web server, fully supported by Microsoft Customer Support, and will soon be localized in French, Spanish, Russian, Korean, Chinese Traditional, Chinese Simplified, Spanish, German, and Japanese.

ARR only installs on IIS 7.x, which means Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2. ARR can be used to load balance requests to Windows Server 2003 and even other types of servers like Java in a Web farm but ARR itself has to be installed on a Windows Server 2008 or later server.

Once you download ARR (use Web Platform Installer for an easy install), you will see a new node called “Server Farms” appear in the left tree-view of our IIS Manager administration console. With ARR, we are adding Server Farms as an IIS Web server concept on the same level as Sites, Servers, and App Pools. ARR gives you the ability to load requests, monitor and manage servers and requests, set up proxying services, establish routing rules (using our URL Rewrite extension) and set up affinity relationships between servers and requests.

One of the innovative Web hosting providers that we work with, MaximumASP, has rolled out a new service called MAXEsp which provides high availability for shared hosting using ARR on top of Windows Server 2008 R2. This type of new offer is exactly what we like to see being built on our IIS platform of Web server + Web server extensions –-- customers either making money or saving money using Windows Server 2008 or later with IIS 7.x and our library of Web extensions.

In this second version of ARR, we introduce support for managing cache hierarchies, which is a requirement for ARR to manage requests in the data centers for Content Delivery Networks (like Akamai). ARR is an integral part of the IIS media hosting platform for high definition media delivery over HTTP. We introduce the ability for ARR v2 to be used on the edge of the network either as a parent node or a child caching node in a data center that can be geographically distributed. Pretty powerful stuff – and it’s free on Windows Server 2008 or later, fully supported by Microsoft and coming soon in 9 languages for international customers.

To learn more about ARR, check out these blogs:

Don has put together a nice collection of links to detailed documentation and walkthroughs to get started.
Eric provides a good summary of ARR on the Windows Server blog with a neat link to case studies for using ARR to replace SQUID.

Using IIS Manager accounts for Web Deployment Tool (msdeploy) delegation

krolson — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 20:04:00 GMT

This blog outlines the basic steps for setting up IIS Manager accounts so that they may be used for Web Deployment Tool delegation.

Most of the steps particular to using IIS Manager users for delegation are required for connecting remotely using the Windows Management service, so if there are already accounts set up for remote management, that work has already been done.

The following steps will allow IIS Manager accounts to be used for management service delegation. Step-by-step instructions with screen shots may be found for steps 1 through 4 on this page, with their section title added in parenthesis: http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/159/configuring-remote-administration-and-feature-delegation-in-iis-70/

1. Make sure that Windows Management Service is installed (Configuring Remote Connections in IIS Manager)

2. Enable remote connections for IIS users (Enable Remote Connections and Configure Identity Credentials)

The previous steps only need to be performed once, however the following steps may be repeated for any number of new IIS Manager users.

3. Create an IIS Manager account (Add an IIS Manager User)

4. Give the user access to a site or application (Configure IIS Manager Permissions for a Site or an Application)

This next step is vital for remote management, without which IIS users could not access or modify content for a site/application. A complete walkthrough for this step is the main focus of this page.

5. Grant access to the physical site/application content (Configure Access Control Lists (ACLs) for Content Directories)

Open IIS Manager (from start menu type “inetmgr” and press ENTER)
Select the site (or application) you want to give an IIS user access to, right-click, and select the “Edit Permissions…” option.

Go to the Security tab and click “Edit…” under the “Group or user names:” section.

This will open a very similar looking Permissions window. Click the “Add…” button.

Now type in the WMSvc identity in the Select Users, Computers, or Groups dialog (i.e. “Local Service” - without the quotation marks. To confirm that this is the account WMSvc uses, check out the section, below, “How to find out what account to add for IIS user ACLs”). Click OK.

Select the LOCAL SERVICE user and modify the Permissions for LOCAL SERVICE by checking/unchecking the permission boxes. For example, you may want to allow Write or Modify permissions.

When finished editing the permissions, click OK. You may be warned that “You are about to change the permission settings on system folders…” depending on where the directory for your web site is located.
Now you will see LOCAL SERVICE in the list of “Group or user names:” and can view the permissions by selecting that account. If at any point you want to change these permissions, you can follow similar steps by clicking Edit and then changing the check-box permission selections.

Click OK when you are finished.

6. Add the IIS user to existing/new Management Service Delegation rules to allow those users to import content, create applications, and/or modify databases

How to find out what account to add for IIS user ACLs

This will typically be “Local Service”, and it is easy to check this.

Click Start and type “Services” – open the Services feature.

In Services, locate the service named “Web Management Service” and see what is listed under the Log On As column.

IIS 7.5 Launched with Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2

bills — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 16:02:17 GMT

Since the Windows 2008 Server launch last March, the IIS team has shipped a bunch of new features that plug-in to IIS7 and in parallel worked on IIS 7.5, launching today in the Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 release.

IIS 7.5 includes many bug fixes, improvements and new features, and is definitely worth grabbing. If you haven’t tried IIS7 yet, check out the many reasons to try it. If you’re already using IIS7 and want to know what’s new in IIS 7.5, Mai-lan just posted an update to her blog with a nice summary. Note: the IIS Extensions which are not already included in IIS 7.5 will install and work on Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2!

How You Can Use IIS7 as Web Front End to Java App Servers

mailant — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 12:32:00 GMT

Ask many server administrators if Microsoft’s IIS Web server can be used with Java servers, and you will probably hear a quick “No way!” with an optional sniff or chuckle, depending on your server preference. Starting with Windows Server 2008 and later, you can set up IIS7 as the Web serving tier in a three-tier deployment to IIS or Java servers on the backend.

Customers are taking advantage of this functionality today if they have an existing Java investment:

Front-end IIS Web server delivering requests to backend WebLogic server running a Deltek time entry system
A major insurance provider using an IIS Web server to deliver requests to TomCat application servers.

The key component is IIS Application Request Routing (ARR), which we ship as a fully supported, free Web extension for Windows Server 2008 and later. If you have Windows Server 2008 or later, ARR 1.0 gives you:

IIS as an option in a three-tier configuration with WebLogic and TomCat backends. It should work with WebSphere too – if you try it, blog about it and let us know!
application load balancing that you can configure easily using rules
dynamic scale your Web app to different servers in a server farm, based on memory and other factors
rules-based ability to bind client requests to specific servers with cookies
centralized configuration management and health monitoring for nodes in a server

In the next few weeks, we will release ARR 2.0, which adds advanced support for Edge serving to distributed cache hierarchies. ARR 2.0 as a pre-release has been running in production for several major content delivery networks as a high-performance Squid alternative on the network Edge.

Useful links:

More information about ARR in general
More information about ARR in a 3-tier configuration with Java app servers
ARR public forum, monitored by the ARR engineering team and ARR community

General availability of Windows 7 & Windows Server 2008 R2, with IIS 7.5

mailant — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 07:22:00 GMT

As of today, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 is generally available for purchase. This latest release of the Windows operating system contains IIS 7.5, which provides a set of enhancements and new functionality on top of the IIS 7 Web server platform.

Windows 7/Windows Server 2008 R2 also marks the first release of a Windows operating system release that includes Web extensions built and refined in our rapid innovation model. See the IIS Web Extension library for the new functionality which ranges from an application request load balancer/proxy to URL rewriting to a deployment platform for Web applications and server.

If you are an administrator looking for a simplified but powerful management experience, IIS 7.5 brings you:

built-in, brand new FTP server and WebDav support that we initially shipped as Web extensions, revised with customer feedback and added to IIS in the Windows operating system
new management console support for administering request filtering rules, FastCGI settings, and ASP.NET settings, part of an Administration Pack that we initially released as a Web download that also includes…
a rich IIS configuration editor built-into the management console to simplify configuration management and generate administration scripts for automated configuration management
integration with Windows Server 2008 R2’s new Best Practice Analyzer with IIS-specific best practice rules
a Windows PowerShell snap-in for IIS, with a library of task-based and lower-level commandlets for IIS administration – shipped first as a Web download and now incorporated into the IIS server in the operating system.
quality enhancements -- otherwise known as bug fixes :-)
config tracing so you can audit changes to the IIS configuration system
application “pre-load” where you can decrease the response time for first requests to an application by pre-loading worker processes, using a Web extension called Application Warm-Up.

If you are a developer wanting to understand the implications of targeting an IIS 7.5 server, consider:

the Server Core installation option in Windows Server 2008 R2’s new support for applications built with the .NET framework 2.0, 3.0, 3.5.1, and 4.0. Your ASP.NET applications can run on the reduced footprint of Server Core installation option
implement IIS trace calls in PHP code, which is hosted via our FastCGI support, so you can used IIS request tracing for diagnostics.
Hostable Web Core, which you can use if you want host IIS in your own process without the full IIS server.
new delegation support for custom errors so that server administrators can give you control over custom error development for your site or app
the change we made to switch the default identity of the IIS app pool from Network Service to Application Pool. This change, driven by our commitment to providing the most secure Web server on the planet, has some implications for developers using SQL Server Express; see here for more information in a KB.
built-in support for .Net 4.0 for your ASP.NET applications

We hope you enjoy this release! We are hard at work now on adding new functionality to the IIS Web extension library for you to download onto Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2. Stay tuned for more free, fully supported downloads from the IIS server team that you can use to extend the functionality of IIS 7 and IIS 7.5.