IIS7 - Web Farms

Host headers and load balancing IIS 7.0

CatZ — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 20:17:06 GMT

Hi, I have a bunch of DNS entries that all point to the same root domain (cms.company.com) example. download.company.com points to cms.company.com and then I get the content dynamically for the specific domain. I have NOT added all the host headers in IIS I have just pointed the sub domains to cms.company.com. When I was running this on a single server I had no problems but now that I want to load balance I run into problems. There is two ways to get the client to end up on the web server: 1. Add the host header entries (not really an option since I have 100's of domains) 2. Add a default port 80 with empty host header (not an options since that is already taken) Does anyone understand what the problem is and does anyone have any suggestions or links to further reading or whatever?

Shared config "Configuration Performance" speed

Dominic D — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 22:31:04 GMT

We have an IIS7.5 farm using shared config which is stored on a central file server (A NAS appliance that i believe runs Samba under the hood).

This started out pretty small 2 servers, less than 10% cpu, and just 1 site. Over time, we've migrated more and more apps to this newer farm from our IIS6 installation. As it stands now, there are 6 servers, averaging around 60% cpu, and around 20 business apps.

We've been extremely happy with both IIS7.5 and shared config. A lot more consistency across the farm, and lower provisioning time. One thing I've started to notice is configuration changes now take significantly longer (up to 1 minute) whereas before they were almost instantaneous. This includes anything from creating a new site, to a new WP, to modifying authentication settings on a site. It's not really a problem, its still infinitely faster and better than making individual changes on all nodes. It's more my curiosity. Pretty much all of my variables changed at the same time, so I really don't know whether its the # of apps, # of servers, or cpu load thats slowed this down.

Has anyone else experienced anything like this?

IIS Manager for Remote Administration - webfarm access

rkr31 — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:47:09 GMT

I have a server farm of 4 servers running shared config for iis configuration and dfsr for file replication. The servers are behind a foundry load balancer.

Our shared config file is stored locally on each server and dfsr is used to replicate this across the farm. This works well and was the configuration that was the most reliable during testing.

I have given external users access to IIS Remote Manager and my question relates to this. What happens if two users edit their site at exactly the same time. Are we likely to find ourselves in the position that one update cannot be fulfilled because the other update has locked the iis config file?

I guess this isseu would relate to the dfsr method of sharing the iis config files as well as shared config its self.

Thanks

Richard

Shared Configuration causing HTTP Error 503 on second server?

gaylen — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 06:52:23 GMT

Hello,

I have 2 servers running 2008 RC0. The primary server has quite a load of software installed including Exchange 2007 while the secondary server is practically fresh. I have a very very simple site I created on the primary server and then setup shared configuration. I am able to get the site to load on the primary server but not the secondary server. If I revert back to local configuration on the secondary server, the site loads just fine. This site is running in it's own application pool. I have verified the standard permissions settings assuming that was the problem, initially. Fairly certain this isn't the case here. As soon as I hit the site on the secondary server the app pool fails and triggers this error.

Anyone else seen this problem in when setting up Shared Configuration in IIS7?

I've read through Mike Volodarsky's articles on troublshooting IIS, which has helped me identify the Event ID of 5002 in my system event log. However, I am unable to get anything out of the Failed Request Tracing logs.

New to NLB Setup windows 2008

esaboopa — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:54:43 GMT

We have setup a two-server NLB cluster for website and FTP site running Windows 2008.

Which method is the best to get website configuration from one server to another server? Which method is the best to replicate the website data between both servers?

We are looking for some URL or reference materials.

Thanks in advanced.

Shared Config Readable one sec not another

Delt-at-uk — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:48:06 GMT

We have a UNC path defined for our IIS shared config. We are using a domain account to provide access to the share and we can access the share with the account. However something strange happens on 1 server of our servers. If you close IIS Manager and open it again it says "There was an error trying to connect, do you want to retype your credentials". Does anyone know what could be causing this?

How to - Best practice - setup for a high volume website - Multiple servers.

Cosmopoet — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 13:32:44 GMT

Hello,

I have spent some time reading this part of the forum but not sure as to how to go about what I am about to do. I need to know how or the best practice to setup a website that is going to be hit pretty hard and I have never load balanced a site or set of servers before. So my questions are:

1. Do I use routers and firewalls with Round Robin DNS with the web site on different web servers?

2. Do I use NLB in server 2008?

3. If so what is the best method to keep the content centrally located at the same time being hosted on different web servers on the same LAN.

This will get me started.

Please and thank you

Joseph

Converting IIS7 config -> IIS7.5

lonevvolf — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 08:21:33 GMT

Is there an easy way to convert the shared config of an IIS7 farm to one for IIS7.5?

web.config locked

waxie — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 10:32:01 GMT

We sometimes have customers with this error:

HTTP Error 500.19 - Internal Server Error
The requested page cannot be accessed because the related configuration data for the page is invalid.
Module IIS Web Core
Notification BeginRequest
Handler Not yet determined
Error Code 0x80070005
Config Error Cannot read configuration file due to insufficient permissions

Also using ftp they can't delete/overwrite their web.config

This happens with new sites when ppl test it. If you wait some hours then all is fine, also reboot of the storageservers solves the problem.

NFS Caching issue

Smatchimo — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 18:48:16 GMT

We are using Windows 2008 R2 with IIS 7.5, and the Client for NFS feature in 2008 R2. The web servers are sitting behind Windows 2008 R2 domain controllers using the UNIX Identity Mapping service.

Web content is saved on a NFS share, which IIS is able to access using a UNC path. The problem is IIS seems to be caching the files too much and not realizing when they are changing.

Let's say a site has a default.aspx page. If the file on the NFS share is modified remotely, IIS continues to serve the old file. If the file is deleted completely IIS continues to serve the old file instead of saying 404 not found. Only if the site is stopped/started then it realizes the file has changed.

If the default.aspx file is local instead of on a NFS share these are not issues.

Also lets say we have two servers, Web1 and Web2, both serving the same files from a NFS share. If I map a network drive to the NFS share on Web1, and edit the file with Notepad, then IIS on Web1 realize it changes and serves the updated content right away, but Web2 continues to serve the old version of the file.

These servers are for a shared hosting environment, where customers will be able to upload new content via a separate FTP server. So currently they may update files, delete files, etc on the FTP server, yet IIS will continue serving the old content unless we stop/start the site, which is a problem.

It isn't Client for NFS itself that's doing this caching, because I can modify a file remotely, then if I open it up in Notepad over the mapped drive to the NFS share, I see the changes already. So Explorer isn't doing any caching anyway but IIS is. I'm not sure what mechanism IIS uses to detect if files change or not but it doesn't seem to work when serving files off of a NFS share.

We are using NFS because that is what our SAN supports, we don't have the extra expensive licenses to use cifs/SMB shares on it, and if we did it would also make it way more complicated to configure as we'd have to configure the SAN so it knew how to map Windows users to UNIX users, instead of letting the 2008 R2 domain controllers handle that in a much simpler fashion.

Network Web servers to two ISP's

Cosmopoet — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 03:58:06 GMT

Hello,

I hope I posted this in the right place :)

I am currently hosting on IIS7 and have been since the product release. I have one ISP at the moment and I am looking to add another for redundancy. My question is I cannot seem to figure out how the IP mappings in the IIS manager for each site would be?

Example: If you had a site listening on 192.168.1.1 and you had this public IP that it was mapped to, go down from ISP #1, and the other ISP picked it up how would the mapping be set? Would you run two host headers with different internal IP's with the same host name?

Better example:

One Router with Load balancing:

ISP #1 Public IP 1.2.3.4 NAT to 192.168.1.1 host header www.example.com

ISP #2 Public IP 4.3.2.1 NAT to 192.168.1.2 host header www.example.com

I think this is what I need to do just not sure?

Any feedback would really put my mind at rest.

Thank you

Joseph

Web gardening while using InProc

cgierlack — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 18:16:21 GMT

Has there been any improvement to IIS 7 so you can benefit by using both InProc and web gardening? I would like to spread processing across multiple w3wp workers but don't want to give up InProc speed boost. Actually I can't use state servers anyway due to several of my objects in session scope are not serializable....plus it's horribly slow....

access database with dfsr

rkr31 — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 15:09:21 GMT

I have an IIS7 farm working without problems across multiple servers using shared config and DFSR but have been asked to support a classic asp site that uses a MS Access backend. Is this supported in shared config? How does the access database behave with locking and replication? What happens if it is edited by two different instances across two different servers at the same time? Will all data get written?

Thanks

Richard

WebFarm NLB

xaronv — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 06:50:19 GMT

Hi,

We want to install a webfarm with 2008 R2 NLB and IIS 7. We currently have two servers with 8go of ram each and 2 processors quadcore on each (ie : two octoprocessors servers).

My question is : do I install nlb on each server and use them on a webFarm or do i install Hyperv on each of them and create a webfarm with four virtual servers (two on each physical servers) ?

thanks in advance

Vincent

Querying farm statistics programmatically

MarcelMeyer — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 15:57:35 GMT

Hi there, Is there a way to query and get stats (the metrics that you get using the Monitoring and Management option, such as the health status, requests per sec, response times etc.) programmatically? The Microsoft.Web.Administration API does not seem to support it. Thank you in advance, Marcel

Upgrade Server 2008 Web x32 to Server 2008 Web R2 x64

harlk — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 11:43:20 GMT

Hi,

We have a 4 server web cluster using the shared IIS config. We are looking into upgrading to 2008 R2 Web x64 edtion.

Am I able to pull one machine from the cluster, upgrade it, re-join it to the cluster and so on, or is it not that simple when upgrading to x64?

Many thanks

Shared Config + Unique Log Files

Smatchimo — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 17:13:57 GMT

So we have a farm of let's say 3 web servers, using the shared config option.

They are all serving shared files from a UNC path (actually a NFS share in Windows 2008 R2 but effectively it's just a UNC path). The log path is also set to a UNC path.

Is there any way to make each server log to a unique path while still using a shared config? I'd hate to have to disable using shared configs, and have to continually make config changes to each of the servers separately, just to have a unique logging folder... but I'm not sure if they could even all share the same folder since the file would be locked by one server and the others wouldn't be able to write to it.

I would like to make them all log to a separate folder based on the server's hostnames, such as \\server\logs\%COMPUTERNAME%\w3svc1 ... I don't have time to test that today so I was hoping someone knows if that would work or if there's some other way to use variables in the paths.

Thanks!

offline files 2008 r2 - sync center only appears for person that setup offline files

Dominic D — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 00:20:27 GMT

We've recently configured offline file support for our shared config repository, following the guide posted at http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/212/offline-files-for-shared-configuration/

On the 4 server farm, i setup two servers and another engineer setup the other two. We just recently noticed that I can't see sync center in the tray, and the share location doesn't have the Available Offline check next to it on the servers the other engineer built. The reverse is true for him, he doesn't see sync center in the tray or the offline check on the servers I built.

It seems like sync center is per user. If so, is it even working for the service accounts that the shares are being mapped to?

Do we need to login as the UNC mapping service account to configure offline files?

Thanks!

IIS Shared Config. There was an error while saving settings joing server to the config

darianva — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 10:14:20 GMT

Hi All,

I thought that I had all my issues with my shared config resolved earlier in the week, when in fact I was back to square 1!

The initial issues I had was a result of copying my applicationhost.config from server to shared config, which resulted in the encryption getting broken. The symptoms I had was that I was not able to edit the credentials of app pools, or IIS VDirs or IIS applications directories. Other symptoms were that session state was not working.

However I updated the key values and all servers were working independantly out of the shared config. (doc http://blogs.iis.net/webtopics/archive/2009/03/15/caution-while-xcopying-iis-7-0-config-files.aspx descibes the error I was getting when editing app pools etc and I followed the steps to resolve the encryption)

So I thought I was all good creating my new shared config....NO! I could export the data from the server (01), but could not join the shared cluster.

I decided to export the config from another server (02) which worked fine. I was then able to join the shared config for this server and the remaining servers in the cluster, except server 01......Tried unistalling and reinstalling the IIS role did not help. Then I found this doc https://forums.iis.net/t/1154548.aspx which decribes that WAS needs to be removed as a feature, and I did that and uninstalled IIS and deleted the IIS and WAS keys from C:\Users\All Users\Microsoft\Crypto\RSA\MachineKeys these keys are the same for IIS servers....they begin with 76944fb33636aeddb9590521c2e8815a for WAS and 6de9cb26d2b98c01ec4e9e8b34824aa2 for IIS. So after deleting them, I reinstalled IIS role and WAS and it joined the shared config!

That is when I thought I was out of the woods and all good, but in fact I was back to square 1 as I was no longer to update app pools etc with the bad data error :(

I proceeded to pull all servers back out the shared config, and update their local apphost.configs with the correct sessionkeys for AES and IIS. Again as 4 individual IIS servers I was able to edit the app pools, and everything was working as expected.

Now here is the very very funny thing, Server 01 and 02 (both originally used as the first server in the shared config, and the server where the config was previous exported from) could not join the shared config.....if you recall from above it was server 01, now server 01 and 02. The error is from these servers is There was an error while saving settings.

I proceeded to export the config from server 03 and join server 03 to the shared config. verified all was working. proceeded to the next server, verified that all was working and everything was. I then tried to join server 01 or 02 to the shared config to get the error There was an error while saving settings, however after a few attempts server 01 did join...weird! Server 02 however has not joined again.

Sorry for such a long post, but I had to include all the details.

Anyone have experience of the above, and there are no server events logs to help!

Thanks
Darian

IIS7 and session for WebFarm

mettlus — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 13:10:05 GMT

I am using a SQL Server for storing my session! Why doesn't my Session_End event fire up?

Configuration:

2 Web Servers in a Farm

Cisco Load Balancer

Win2k8 Web Editions

cannot create new app pool

darianva — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 20:00:35 GMT

hi all

got my IIS7 cluster running using shared config all is well, well sort of! I have about 200 sites running and it is working a treat, however I am not able to add any new sites/app pools.

If I use the UI to create a app pool manually it remains stopped, and shows as a unknown state.

If i try and start it i get the pop-up: there was an error performing this operation.

details: the object identifier does not represent a valid object. (exception from hresult: 0x800710D8)

Anyone have ideas on how to resolve this? I have not tried a reboot as I was hoping there was a 'real' issue we can look into. There are also no event in the evt log....

thanks

darian

Best Practices for busy website

andybooth — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 01:29:14 GMT

Hello Everyone, I am new to the forum, found you when googling about for answers.

Most of the applications we run on our servers are small enough in terms of users for a single server deployment, so that IIS and SQL Server exist on the same box. However, we may have to host an application that will get far more hits than we are used to.

This is what got me looking into Webfarms.

I was originally looking at hard ware based load balancers like Foundry and F5 as I thought thats what is required, but I see a lot of people talking about NLB on here. Our issue is we could have 100k+ users online at the same time.

I dont think IIS is really going to be our problem, the ASP.Net application will utilise a SQL database and I think that will be the bottleneck, however, I need to get my head around what direction we should be researching and hopefully thats where you could maybe steer us in the right direction.

Based on 100k users, should we be looking at NLB or something else? How do you scale out SQL server (Perhaps thats something not for this forum and I fully understand if thats the case)

I also understand about session state and how this needs to be handled, but if someone could please be kind enough to start us off in the right direction, I would be most grateful.

Andy

shared configuration - authcert.dll failed to load

Adam Cassar — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 04:21:54 GMT

Hi,

I'm having a problem with a shared WWW farm using the new 'shared configuration' feature of IIS7.

The machines in the cluster all see new new virtualhosts and setting changes are reflected between hosts - however newly created application pools only work on the server they where created on, other servers show:

The Module DLL C:\Windows\System32\inetsrv\authcert.dll failed to load. The data is the error.

The data is: 0000007E

Any ideas as to where to look for the problem?

Assistance with setting up MSDeploy jobs to sync IIS 7 sites

Tray_Harrison — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 19:58:16 GMT

Hey guys, I've been playing with MS Deploy and have almost got it where I want it but need a little assistance. I'm trying to use it for the purposes of syncing content and IIS websites between 2 servers in a web farm. Basically I'm trying to replace the functionality of what we used to use Application Center for.

What I've done is create a batch file for each website with information similar to this:

@ Echo Off
ECHO Starting Deployment at %DATE %TIME% >msdeploySync.log
appcmd add backup
"C:\Program Files\IIS\Microsoft Web Deploy\msdeploy.exe" -verb:sync -source:apphostconfig="www.test.net" -dest:apphostconfig="www.test.net",computername=SERVER2 > msdeploysync.log
ECHO. >>msdeploysync.log
ECHO Deployment Complete %DATE% %TIME% >msdeploysync.log
ECHO Deployment Complete
pause

This works ok except for this issue:

1. When I run the above command, I will get an error if the application pool is not already created on the destination server. It would be nice if this deployment job could create the application pool, along with the site/content.

Is there anything I can change in order to get it to move everything for the site over to the new server, including the application pool? Or is there a better way to keep things synced up? Shared content/configuration is not an option as these servers are in our DMZ and we do not have any DFS shares available out there. Thanks.

(shared configuration) offline folders problem

diezg — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 16:34:02 GMT

Hi all,

I'm trying to configure offline folders for shared configuration on a Windows 2008 server and I'm having a problem.

I have enabled offline folders as described in the article http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/212/offline-files-for-shared-configuration/

But when I right-click on the network folder that I want to make available offline and check the option "Always available offline" nothing happens (the offline symbol does not appear in the folder). When I right-click again in the folder the option is not checked.

Anyone knows what I'm missing?

Thanks!