Today IIS team has published a servicing release of Web Farm Framework 2. This release contains fixes for the bugs reported in version 2.0 that was published in January this year. The following bugs have been fixed in this release:
- If a server was excluded from load balancing because of an error or if it was temporary unavailable then it required administrator to manually add it back. With this release the Web Farm Service will attempt to auto-repair unavailable servers and add them back to load balancing once they become healthy again.
- Non-standard HTTP ports could not be used when communicating with servers in web farm.
- Error caused by race condition between when applicationHost.config is updated and when service reads the configuration.
- Service attempted to add firewall exception and failed if firewall service was not running.
- MSDeploy 1.1 was always installed on servers in the farm, even if MSDeploy 2.0 was available.
- Recycling of the app pool on the controller resulted in HTTP 502 errors.
- Secondary servers kept synchronizing the same changes over and over again.
- When primary server came back after downtime, the provisioning did not start automatically.
- Sync Error “An item with the same key has already been added.”
- User profile was not loaded when service was installed which caused installation failures.
Install the Web Farm Framework 2.1
To install Web Farm Framework 2.1 use the download links at the project’s home page at http://www.iis.net/expand/WebFarmFramework.
If you have Web Farm Framework 2.0 already installed, then it will be updated to v2.1. Note that a reboot maybe required during update and after the reboot the WebFarmService must be restarted on the controller server by using the command below:
net start webfarmservice
More information
ruslany on July 29th 2011 in Other
3,253 views
A month ago I have stopped using Google Analytics for my site and instead gave a try to Piwik – an open source, PHP/MySQL based real time web analytics application. Since then it has been working well for my site and overall to me it looks like a better alternative to Google Analytics.
Here are the things that I like: Continue Reading »
ruslany on May 16th 2011 in Other
4,325 views
Today IIS team has released to web the Web Farm Framework 2.0. This is the final, production ready version that has several new features and improvements listed below:
- Workflow Builder is 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 msdeploy command to partially sync web site content.
- Windows Credential Store support allows 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 in Web Farm Framework.
- Third party load balancers support via Web Farm Framework extensibility. It is possible to configure Web Farm Framework to integrate with hardware load balancers instead of relying on IIS Application Request Routing module.
- Improved support for advanced MSDeploy operations. Options of MSDeploy can be used with Web Farm Framework for advanced deployment scenarios.
- Improved support for syncing large amount of files. Several issues related to syncing large amount of files across web farm nodes have been fixed.
In addition to that many bugs reported by beta users were fixed in this release.
Install the Web Farm Framework 2.0 – RTW
To install Web Farm Framework 2.0 use the download links at the project’s home page at http://www.iis.net/expand/WebFarmFramework.
If you have a beta build of Web Farm Framework 2.0 already installed, then it needs to be uninstalled prior to installing RTW build.
More information
ruslany on January 20th 2011 in Other
4,507 views
IIS team has recently released a Web Farm Framework 2.0 beta. The goal of the Web Farm Framework is to enable easy provisioning, deployment and managing of web farms. This blog post provides an example of what Web Farm Framework can do and how it can simplify the Web Farm management tasks.
To demonstrate the capabilities of the tool, we will create a simple web farm that looks as on the following diagram:
- The load balancer will be using the Application Request Routing for IIS 7 and will also act as a Web Farm Controller. Web Farm Controller manages all the machines within the web farm and it has the Web Farm Framework 2.0 installed.
- The Primary Server, in addition to serving the web requests, also acts as an example server for all the other servers in the farm. Web Farm Framework will ensure that every new secondary server added to the web farm has exact same components installed and is configured exactly as the primary server.
- The Secondary Server(s) will serve web requests. It’s configuration and content matches the primary server. Continue Reading »
ruslany on July 30th 2010 in Other
12,650 views
This post has been updated from its original version to correct the installation instructions, which have changed since the time the post was written in Feb 2009.
With the addition of .NET Framework to Server Core in Windows Server 2008 R2 the Server Core installation option became even more appealing for those who want to use a very low footprint server for hosting their applications. Availability of .NET framework provides the following great benefits:
- ASP.NET support – you can now use Server Core to host your ASP.NET applications.
- IIS Remote Management – Server Core does not provide any user interface other than command line. But if you prefer to use IIS Manager UI to administer IIS, you can now use IIS Remote Manager to connect to IIS on Server Core and perform all the management tasks from within familiar UI of IIS Manager.
- PowerShell – Windows Server 2008 R2 includes IIS PowerShell snapin, which is also available on Server Core.
This post describes how to setup and configure IIS on Server Core in Windows Server 2008 R2. Specifically the following tasks are described:
- Using oclist and ocsetup commands
- Basic Installation of IIS
- Installing ASP.NET
- Installing PowerShell and IIS snap-in
- Enabling IIS Remote Management
Continue Reading »
ruslany on February 26th 2009 in Other
13,565 views
Today IIS team has released the Dynamic IP Restrictions Extension for IIS 7.0 – Beta. The Dynamic IP Restrictions Extension provides IT Professionals and Hosters a configurable module that helps mitigate or block Denial of Service Attacks or cracking of passwords through Brute-force by temporarily blocking Internet Protocol (IP) addresses of HTTP clients who follow a pattern that could be conducive to one of such attacks. This module can be configured such that the analysis and blocking could be done at the Web Server or the Web Site level.
Install the Dynamic IP Restrictions Beta Today!
Microsoft Dynamic IP Restrictions for IIS 7.0 – Beta (x86)
Microsoft Dynamic IP Restrictions for IIS 7.0 – Beta (x64)
If IIS already has IPv4 Address and IP restrictions module enabled then Dynamic IP Restrictions installer will need to un-install the existing module in order to continue the setup process. Note that the existing IPv4 configuration will be preserved while old module is removed and new module is installed. Continue Reading »
ruslany on February 16th 2009 in Other
7,292 views
ASP.NET Web Forms extensively use postback mechanism in order to maintain the state of the server-side controls on the web page. This makes it somewhat tricky to perform URL rewriting for ASP.NET pages. When a server side form control is added to the web page, ASP.NET will render the response with HTML <form> tag that contains an action attribute pointing back to the page where the form control is. This means that if URL rewriting was used for that page, the action attribute will point back to the rewritten URL, not to the URL that was requested from the browser. This will cause the browser to show rewritten URL any time a postback occurs.
Continue Reading »
ruslany on October 22nd 2008 in Other
65,852 views
The big benefit of IIS 7 integrated request processing pipeline is the fact that all the nice and useful ASP.NET features can be used for any type of content on your web site; not just for ASP.NET-specific content. For example, ASP.NET SQL-based membership can be used to protect static files and folders. Also, ASP.NET extensibility API’s, such as IHttpHandler and IHttpModule can be used to add custom modules and handlers that would be executed even for non-ASP.NET content.
IIS 6 did not have this level of integration. ASP.NET was plugged into IIS 6 as an ISAPI extension and by default was configured to handle ONLY requests mapped to that extension – for example any request that ended with “.aspx” would be be processed by ASP.NET extension. This obviously was a big limitation for customers who wanted to be able to use ASP.NET features for all other contend on web site. The most common way to workaround that was to use “Wildcard script mapping”. This post explains how an application that used wildcard script mapping in IIS 6 can be migrated over to IIS 7.
Continue Reading »
ruslany on September 30th 2008 in Other
33,479 views
My name is Ruslan Yakushev. I am a program manager on IIS team, working on some of the very interesting projects that are being developed in the team right now. I have joined the team about a year ago, and was thinking about starting a blog for a while now. The primary work responsibilities kept me busy, so I have been postponing blog idea for a while. Every time I needed to make an announcement or an update on IIS community site, I asked some of my colleagues on the team to blog my content. Finally, I figured that I should probably start my own blog, so I could have all the freedom of publishing my own content any time I want.
Being a technical program manager on the team, I like to use (in other words – “dogfood”) the products that team develops. Hence I decided to self-host my own blog by using latest version of IIS. Also, I have been working with FastCGI and PHP for a while now, and became quite familiar with many popular PHP applications. As a result I chose to run my blog by using latest version of WordPress, which is a very nice and easy to use blog engine application. Finally, I am using my favorite feature of IIS 7.0 – URL rewriter – to enable “pretty permalinks” on my blog.
I plan to use this blog to publish information related to FastCGI, PHP, URL rewriter and IIS in general. I hope you’ll find this content useful.
ruslany on July 10th 2008 in Other
10,579 views
(2 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)
(3 votes, average: 4.67 out of 5)