IIS 7 on Vista Home Premium and Windows Server 2008

Question

I am a developer, when i bought a laptop, i got Vista Home Premium installed on it. I have IIS 7.0 running on it. Is the IIS 7 running on my Vista Home Premium machine the same as the one that is on Windows Server 2008?

Answer 1

Details on differences are listed this technet article and depend on which version of Vista you are running (eg. in Home Premium you can only have 3 simultaneous connections).

Essentially this is because IIS 7 on Vitsa is mainly for development while on Windows Server 2008 it is for hosting or in Microsoft's words:

IIS7 on Vista

IIS7 on Vista is for developers to build and test applications, and IIS7 extensions, on our new Web server platform.

...

IIS7 on Server

On Server, our goals with IIS7 go well beyond this. If IIS7 on Vista is all about enabling people to develop applications on IIS, IIS7 on Server is all about enabling people to deploy and operate application in a high performance, high availability way.

Answer 2

The most important features of IIS 7 are available in Windows Vista Home Premium too.

The main difference are the availble authentification methods in the security options. It is not possible to use Windows Authentication, Digest Authentication, Client Certificate Mapping Authentication and IIS Client Certificate Mapping Authentication.

On Home Premium you can have IIS serving only 3 connections silmultaneously (10 on Ultimate and Business.)

Further, IIS 7 Vista Home Premium lacks the FTP server component and ODBC Logging.