IIS Shared Configuration, used for webfarms, requires very little maintenance. However, there is one consideration that comes up commonly, which is how to install applications on the web servers when shared configuration is enabled.

This lesson walks through the steps necessary to take servers out of rotation without overwriting the good configuration, and without making the common mistake of getting the config and server installs out of sync.

The following checklist is the one that I chose to use in this video. You can use this for your reference.

• WE01 - take out of shared config
• WE01 - iisreset
• WE01 - install
• WE02 - take out of shared config
• WE02 - iisreset
• WE02 - install
• WE03 - take out of shared config
• WE03 - iisreset
• WE03 - install
• WE01 - export to shared config location
• WE01 - add back to shared config
• WE01 - iisreset
• WE02 - add back to shared config
• WE02 - iisreset
• WE03 - add back to shared config
• WE03 - iisreset

Since an iisreset is required to take a node out of rotation and then again to put it back in, it makes it difficult complete everything in a single pass.

There are some tricks that you can consider to perform this in a single pass:

• If you test and confirm that administration.config is not touched, then you may not need to perform the iisreset. Be careful though since the install process may cause administration.config to move back to the local configuration.
• You can consider turning off your server replication (DFS in my case) during the staggered install so that you can fully complete each node in a single pass.
• Another option I've heard mentioned is to push shared config to a new location. Of course you need to ensure that replication is addressed.

If you disable replication or publish to a new location then you can perform the following steps instead:

• WEB01 - take out of shared config
• WEB01 - iisreset
• WEB01 - install
• WEB01 - export to shared config location
• WEB01 - add back to shared config
• WEB01 - iisreset
• WEB02 - take out of shared config
• WEB02 - iisreset
• WEB02 - install
• WEB02 - export to shared config location or copy from WEB01
• WEB02 - add back to shared config
• WEB02 - iisreset
• Repeat WEB02 steps for all other nodes.

This is now the 5th week in a mini-series on web farms, and the 30th week of the entire series. You can view past and future weeks in the section below.

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About Scott Forsyth

Senior Systems Engineer at ORCS Web, Inc (www.orcsweb.com) and co-founder of Vaasnet (www.vaasnet.com). Microsoft MVP for IIS. ASPInsider. Strengths are IIS, ASP.NET, DNS, Windows Server, and Hyper-V. This author has published 50 articles on DotNetSlackers. View other articles or the complete profile here.