Chapter 1: IIS Fundamentals

Internet Information Services (IIS) is Microsoft's suite of applications for the Internet. With support for the web, File Transfer Protocol (FTP), Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP), and Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) for e-mail, IIS is much more than just a web server. Because it is fully integrated at the operating system level, it integrates well with Microsoft .NET applications, and it allows organizations to add Internet capabilities that weave directly into the rest of their infrastructure.

As the Internet becomes more prevalent in our daily lives, the infrastructure behind it becomes more complicated, and the knowledge of how to support that infrastructure becomes more valuable. This chapter will introduce you to Windows Server 2003 (WS03) and the features of IIS 6. It also covers the metabase (which holds all the configuration information for IIS) and the architecture of IIS 6. Let's get started.

About Windows Server 2003

IIS 6 is the latest version of Microsoft's web server, and it's packaged with Windows Server 2003, which comes in four flavors: Web Server, Standard Server, Enterprise Server, and Datacenter Server.

Web Server is a limited functionality version. It gives you everything you need to run a web server, including network load balancing, but it can't act as a domain controller. It also can't act as a certificate authority and issue certificates. The upside? Lower price.

Standard Server is your garden-variety server operating system. It offers the standard functionality and is the version most people run.

Enterprise Server gives you everything Standard Server does, plus the ability to make a four-node cluster network configuration. In addition, if the hardware supports it, you can add memory while the server is running. Enterprise Server also allows you to cluster servers together for fault tolerance, rather than just balancing traffic across servers. Enterprise Server will also be released in a 64-bit edition.

Datacenter Server, the big dog of the family, supports the most processors and the most RAM, all at a greater cost. It also offers Microsoft's Datacenter support program. Datacenter Server includes support for up to eight-node clusters. Like Enterprise Server, Datacenter Server will be released in a 64-bit edition.

Hardware Support in Windows 2003

The big draw of a more expensive version is its hardware support. The following table details the hardware supported by each version of WS03; as you can see, the more expensive the version, the more memory and processors it can support.

	Web	Standard	Enterprise	Datacenter
Max RAM	2G	4G	32G*	64G*
Max Processors	2	2	8	32

*The Itanium processors support twice the RAM in these versions.