How do you manage large web farms?

Question

I have a quickly growing web farm running IIS 7 (30+ servers). All servers are identical copies of each other and all servers are physical. We update the software about once a month, and in the current process, we follow the following steps:

1. Disable server from pool on F5 load balancer.
2. Disable HTTP Keep-alives in IIS so connections drop quickly.
3. Change default directory of website to new folder containing new binaries.
4. Test server
5. Enable HTTP Keep-alives.
6. Enable server in F5 pool.
7. Move to server 2

Microsoft used to have Application Center which was abandoned a while ago. They have made a second attempt with the Web Farm Framework, but this adds as much QA time testing the release package as it saves in the deployment.

Has anyone seen a commercial off the shelf application that is tailored for managing and deploying to large web farms?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Web Deploy is the new method that Microsoft recommends for deploying websites, and they have some guidance on using it to deploy to web farms. At the very least you could probably automate most of the steps using Powershell.

You may also want to look at the recently released Web Farm Framework beta preview, which allows you to easily provision and mange a farm of IIS 7 web servers.

Answer 2

Actually the new recommendation is to use the Web Farm Framework to manage those servers, it can help you to deploy and syncronize your servers (internally using Web Deploy) and monitor their health and run custom operations across the farms. The Beta version is already available, see : http://www.iis.net/download/webfarmframework

Answer 3

All of ours are VMs fronted through Cisco ACEs and Zeus ZXTMs. We tend to add a new VM with the updated software into the cluster VIP first, let it take some load, only then do we take out an existing VM. We do the same drain process as you, then we add another VM and repeat. We usually do the first couple of servers by hand before rolling out the rest by script.

Answer 4

check at quattor. But i think that is only being used for linux

Answer 5

Use Microsoft Web Farm Framework. Below is the website link for your reference. http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/09/08/introducing-the-microsoft-web-farm-framework.aspx