How do you synchronize content between IIS Servers?

Question

I just came across this utility that will sync IIS servers and was wondering what other software people are using?

http://www.iis.net/download/WebDeploy

The company I'm at uses a very old version of Content Management Server 2003 and I'm looking for a supported product.

Answer 1

That web deployment tool is good!

Disclosure: MSFT employee, clearly biased!

The Web Deployment Tool can migrate sites and apps between servers, and has some really useful features for determining whether configuration has drifted between servers within a farm.

Generally, you -verb:sync content into a package of some sort, then you can -verb:sync or -verb:migrate that package to an IIS 6.0 or 7.0 target server. If you're just curious, you can -whatif the operation, which will identify all proposed changes between source and target servers.

In my experience, with IIS 6 servers, the key problem that develops over time is that the metabases drift between farm members (unless it was carefully planned and managed from the beginning), and that can lead to - let's call them interesting - farm behaviours. This tool can evaluate metabase differences, content differences, the works, with much less effort than trying to script IISCNFG.vbs to achieve the same result. The syntax is a little confronting at first, but the investment is worthwhile, IMHO.

CMS had a separate workflow and deployment engine, as I recall, so it might not have comparable features on the workflow front, but for pushing sites around between servers, and synchronizing farms (both content and settings), I've found WebDeploy is pretty good.

Answer 2

For something that old, running on Windows 2003 (I assume) I'd probably go with robocopy or something similar.

For Windows 2008 servers I use DFS between the servers (for the sites that need it like WordPress). For sites that where all files are pushed by a sysadmin we just push to each server manually so we keep pull one server out of the load balencer at a time upgrade it, then put them all in pulling the last one down.