How do you manage large web farms?

Question

I have a quickly growing web farm running IIS 7 (30+ servers). All servers are identical copies of each other and all servers are physical. We update the software about once a month, and in the current process, we follow the following steps:

Disable server from pool on F5 load balancer.
Disable HTTP Keep-alives in IIS so connections drop quickly.
Change default directory of website to new folder containing new binaries.
Test server
Enable HTTP Keep-alives.
Enable server in F5 pool.
Move to server 2

Microsoft used to have Application Center which was abandoned a while ago. They have made a second attempt with the Web Farm Framework, but this adds as much QA time testing the release package as it saves in the deployment.

Has anyone seen a commercial off the shelf application that is tailored for managing and deploying to large web farms?

Thanks!

Product recommendations, including recon, are off topic per the updated [FAQ](http://serverfault.com/faq). — sysadmin1138, Nov 27 '12 at 21:33

Greg Bray · Answer 1 · 2010-09-08T20:08:45.323

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Web Deploy is the new method that Microsoft recommends for deploying websites, and they have some guidance on using it to deploy to web farms. At the very least you could probably automate most of the steps using Powershell.

You may also want to look at the recently released Web Farm Framework beta preview, which allows you to easily provision and mange a farm of IIS 7 web servers.

edited Sep 08 '10 at 20:08

answered Jul 29 '10 at 05:17

Greg Bray

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score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 05 '10 at 05:00

Actually the new recommendation is to use the Web Farm Framework to manage those servers, it can help you to deploy and syncronize your servers (internally using Web Deploy) and monitor their health and run custom operations across the farms. The Beta version is already available, see : http://www.iis.net/download/webfarmframework

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Nov 09 '11 at 21:51

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Use Microsoft Web Farm Framework. Below is the website link for your reference. http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/09/08/introducing-the-microsoft-web-farm-framework.aspx

answered Nov 09 '11 at 21:51

srikanth

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The OP stated that the WFF was unacceptable to them. – Brent Pabst Nov 26 '12 at 21:42

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Jul 28 '10 at 15:46

All of ours are VMs fronted through Cisco ACEs and Zeus ZXTMs. We tend to add a new VM with the updated software into the cluster VIP first, let it take some load, only then do we take out an existing VM. We do the same drain process as you, then we add another VM and repeat. We usually do the first couple of servers by hand before rolling out the rest by script.

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Jul 29 '10 at 08:22

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check at quattor. But i think that is only being used for linux

answered Jul 29 '10 at 08:22

Nikolaidis Fotis

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score -3 · Answer 6 · edited Nov 26 '12 at 22:05

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This is url with that what you need - iControl.dll this is it :) https://devcentral.f5.com/wiki/iControl.PsPoolMemberControl.ashx

You must have account on devcentral - making account is free.

edited Nov 26 '12 at 22:05

sysadmin1138

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answered Nov 26 '12 at 21:38

przemas

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This doesn't help answer the original question. – Brent Pabst Nov 26 '12 at 21:43
While this link may answer the question, it is better to include the essential parts of the answer here and provide the link for reference. Link-only answers can become invalid if the linked page changes. – Michael Hampton Nov 26 '12 at 22:00

How do you manage large web farms?

6 Answers6