IIS Planning Issues

I’ll end this chapter by discussing a few matters connected specifically with installing IIS 6 once you’ve upgraded to or installed Windows Server 2003 on a system. Most of the deployment planning and work has to do with deploying the underlying Windows Server 2003 operating system; but because this is a book about IIS, you need to get that component up and running, too.

Installing IIS

As an extra security feature, when you install Windows Server 2003 Standard, Enterprise, or Datacenter Edition on a machine, IIS 6 is not automatically installed by default—you have to manually install it after Setup is finished in order to turn your machine into a web server. Obviously this is not the case with Web Edition, which installs IIS 6 by default because this is the main function of that edition!

If you have performed a clean install of Standard, Enterprise, or Datacenter Edition, there are two ways you can manually install IIS 6 after Setup is complete:

• Use the Manage Your Server Wizard that appears when you first log on as Administrator after installing Windows Server 2003 on your machine. In the Adding Roles To Your Server section, select Add Or Remove A Role to start the Configure Your Server Wizard. Then follow the prompts to install the Application Server (IIS or ASP.NET) role, select or deselect optional components for that role (ASP.NET is selected by default), and complete the wizard.

• Use the Start menu to select Control Panel | Add/Remove Programs | Add/Remove Windows Components | Application Server. Click the Details button and select the components you want to install.

The second approach is a little more customizable than the first, but in most cases the Manage Your Server Wizard will suffice.

If you are doing an automated install, you can use the unattend.txt file to include IIS in the components to be installed. Similarly, if you are using Sysprep, you can install IIS 6 on your master system and then clone target systems using third-party disk imaging software. But if you are upgrading an existing IIS 4 (Windows NT) or IIS 5 (Windows 2000) web server to Windows Server 2003, you won’t need to install IIS 6 afterward because IIS 4/5 will automatically be upgraded to IIS 6.

Installing ASP.NET

You need to install ASP.NET components on your web server only if you plan to develop and run dynamic web applications, not just static HTML content, on your server. In most cases, you’ll want to do this of course, and I’ll talk more about configuring applications in Chapter 8, “Creating and Configuring Applications.”

Installing FrontPage Server Extensions

If you plan to have users develop and manage content on your web server using Microsoft FrontPage, you’ll need to install the FrontPage Server Extensions after installing IIS. We’ll look at using FrontPage Server Extensions in Chapter 16, “Publishing with IIS.”

Sample Web Applications

Previous versions of IIS automatically installed sample scripts and web applications for you to play with and learn from. For security reasons (to harden the system), version 6 of IIS does not do this. You can, however, install sample scripts manually if you choose to, but doing this doesn’t create a Scripts virtual directory under the default website as it did in earlier versions of IIS—this is another security improvement in version 6.

Web Service Extensions (WSE)

IIS 6 automatically installs in locked-down mode. To get things like ASP.NET applications to work properly, you have to selectively unlock various settings using the Web Service Extensions (WSE) node within the IIS console tree. We’ll examine this matter in detail when we look at IIS security in Chapter 10, “Securing IIS,” but be aware that configuring security settings on your web servers is a deployment planning issue you need to consider ahead of time.

Application Isolation Mode

Depending on whether you need to ensure compatibility with applications developed for IIS 5 or ensure the greatest degree of application reliability, you need to plan and decide which application isolation mode to run your IIS web server in: worker process isolation mode or IIS 5 isolation mode. During the deployment planning process, you should test your existing web applications to see if they will work properly in worker process isolation mode, which is the preferred operation mode that takes advantage of the new IIS 6 architecture. If you perform a clean install of Windows Server 2003 and install the IIS 6 component, your web server is automatically running in worker process isolation mode. If you upgraded your system from IIS 4 (Windows NT) or IIS 5 (Windows 2000), then it’s running in IIS 5 isolation mode. You can, of course, change the mode if your deployment requires this; the procedure for doing so is outlined in Chapter 8, “Creating and Configuring Applications.”

Challenge

You have a medium-size business that has a network with a dozen servers and several hundred workstations. Your servers are running Windows 2000 Server and you want to take advantage of the new features of Windows Server 2003, particularly the increased stability and reliability of version 6 of IIS, which you see as advantageous for your company intranet. What edition of Windows Server 2003 would you upgrade your Windows 2000 Server machines to and why? What hardware considerations might be important in planning your upgrade? What budget considerations are important to your decision? What deployment method would you use and why?