Introducing the Microsoft Web Farm Framework
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by Scott Guthrie
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Application Provisioning using the Web Farm Framework

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.


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