Web Farm Framework 2 now available for free download
Yesterday we shipped another awesome piece of software, this time for those who make their living running groups of Web servers. Web Farm Framework is a free, fully supported, Microsoft product. Web Farm Framework enables you to automate the installation and configuration of platform components across your cluster, and also makes it easy to synchronize content, configuration and other resources associated with your ASP.NET or PHP applications.
Web Farm Framework 2 now supports integration with hardware load balancers, and enables you to orchestrate updates across your servers so that your site/application is never down or unavailable to customers . For example, Web Farm Framework can automatically pull servers one-at-a-time out of the load balancer rotation, update them, and then inject them back into rotation.
In the final release we fixed a ton of bugs based on user feedback and also added a few cool new features, including:
- Workflow Builder can be used to define and schedule custom tasks that can be run on all servers in the farm. The tasks can be scheduled to run periodically or can be started manually by an administrator. An example of such task could be a web deploy command to partially sync web site content.
- Windows Credential Store support enables you to store the administrator credentials used for server provisioning in a secure Windows Credential Store. This enables an added layer of security when dealing with credentials with the Web Farm Framework.
- Third party load balancers support via Web Farm Framework extensibility. It is now possible to configure the Web Farm Framework to integrate with hardware load balancers instead of relying on the (free) IIS Application Request Routing module.
- Improved support for advanced Web Deploy operations. More Web Deploy features can now be used with the Web Farm Framework for advanced deployment scenarios.
- Improved support for syncing large amount of files. Several issues related to syncing large amounts of files across web farm nodes have been fixed between the beta and today’s release.
The team has posted a bunch of articles on how to use Web Farm Framework, here are a few pointers for more info:
Visit the below links to learn more about the Web Farm Framework 2.0 release:
- Introducing the Microsoft Web Farm Framework
- Download the Web Farm Framework V2 Release
- Read the Web Farm Framework 2.0 Documentation
- Web Farm Framework Forum (the team monitors this so ask your questions here)