Once the Microsoft Web Farm Framework is installed, you’ll find a new “Server Farm” node listed within the left-hand tree view of the IIS Admin Tool on the “DemoController” machine.  If you right-click on this “Server Farm” node you’ll see an option to “Create Server Farm…”

Selecting this option will bring up a “Create Server Farm” dialog – and allow us to configure and setup a farm of machines that we want to manage together.

We’ll name the new server farm we want to create “DemoFarm”, and indicate that we want to automatically provision all of the servers in the farm (by checking the “Provision Server Farm” option in the dialog).  We’ll also indicate that we want to make it available for load-balancing with the IIS Application Request Routing (ARR) load-balancer:

When we click the “Next” button the wizard will bring up an “Add Servers” dialog that allows us to specify the servers we want to have in the web farm. We can add any number of servers at the time of first setup.  We can also come back and add more servers to the server farm later.  When you add more servers to the farm later, the Web Farm Framework will automatically provision and update them to have the latest changes (allowing us to easily add additional capacity at any time).

For this walkthrough we’ll add our two servers – “DemoPrimary” and “DemoSeconday” to our server farm.  We’ll start by adding the “DemoPrimary” machine.  We’ll select the “Primary Server” checkbox in the dialog – which will indicate that its role is to act as the primary server that the other servers in the farm will replicate:

Once we add the “DemoPrimary” server we’ll also add the “DemoSecondary” server to the farm.  

When we click the “Finish” button the Web Farm Framework will connect to the servers we’ve added to the farm and automatically provision the appropriate management software on them for us (no need for us to install anything manually – the web farm framework will automatically install its management service on the target machines).  Clicking the “servers” tab in the “Server Farm” node in the IIS Admin tool always provides an up-to-date view of the provisioning and deployment operations happening across all the farm (you can also filter it by individual server if you want):

At this point we are completely done configuring our web farm.  We now have a working, automated, web farm enabled. 

We have setup our web farm for automated provisioning and synchronization/replication.  If we were to create sites or application pools on the “DemoPrimary” web server, or install or update applications on it, they would be automatically replicated/synchronized on the “DemoSeconday” server.  This is also true for any web platform components we install. We do not need to manually install or configure anything on any additional secondary servers we add to the farm. The Web Farm Framework will automate keeping them synchronized with our Primary Server – and enable us to manage the entire farm of servers as a group.