The Web Farm Framework enables you to easily deploy and replicate/synchronize
Sites, Applications, Content and Settings across a Web Farm. It uses the
Microsoft Web Deploy technology to enable application deployment in an
automated fashion (no manual steps required for both adding new applications
and updating existing ones).
By default, the Web Farm Framework will automatically
synchronize the Sites, Applications, Content and Settings we’ve configured on
our “DemoPrimary” server to our “DemoSeconday” server (and any other
web-servers we later add to the server farm). We can use any application
deployment mechanism we want to create and copy the application up onto the
“DemoPrimary” machine. This means we could use FTP/SFTP or the Microsoft
Web Deploy framework to deploy the sites/content to “DemoPrimary”. It also
means any web applications that use a custom MSI installer or custom
batch-file/powershell script to deploy applications onto our “DemoPrimary” will
also work.
The benefit of supporting any deployment mechanism is that
you can leverage any of the existing application/site/app-pool deployment
approaches you already use with IIS to update your primary server – and then
use the Web Farm Framework to automatically have the installed
application/site/content automatically replicated across the other machines in
the web-farm. This makes it easier to integrate the Microsoft Web Farm
Framework into your existing deployment workflows.
If you click the “Application Provisioning” icon in the IIS
admin tool you can specify the synchronization frequency with which you want
the servers in the web-farm to check for application/site/content updates (by
default it happens every 30 seconds).
You can also optionally specify any additional Microsoft Web
Deploy providers you want to use to copy custom settings across machines in the
web-farm. For example, if you want a custom registry setting copied – you
can enable that. If you want to set a custom NTFS security ACL – you can
enable that. If you want to copy/register a COM object – you can enable
that. If you’ve built your own custom “FooProvider” to do some custom
stuff – you can enable that too.
When you make changes or updates to applications on your
primary server, the Web Farm Framework will automatically synchronize and copy
them to the other servers in the server-farm for you. No manual steps
required.