How do you compare the settings on two IIS7 instances

Question

We have two servers in diferent data centers and we have a problem with a site running in IIS7 on one of these servers.

We want to compare the settings between the two, and in IIS6 I would have just exported the metadata and compaired them using a file compare tool.

How do you do this on IIS7?

Answer 1

You can try msdeploy. This microsoft tool can be used to sync/compare different IIS server.

Answer 2

IIS7 & IIS7

Most IIS7 settings are held in the web.config files in the root folders of the web applications and virtual folders. These can be compared with any text diff tool (albeit the XML format means two equivalent files could appear very different just by re-ordering nodes).

To get the list of virtual directories, web applications and application pools you need to use the command line tool C:\Windows\system32\inetsrv\appcmd.exe. E.g.

C:\Windows\system32\inetsrv\appcmd.exe list apppool

will list all application pools.

IIS6 & IIS7

In this case things are not so simple. An export of the metabase is a completely different format.

One option might be to the use metabase export, and on IIS7 install and IIS6 metabase comparability (use web server role options to select this) and then compare the export output.