IIS7 Modules finally bring basic Apache functionality
July 16th, 2008I have never been a huge fan of IIS. It has always struck me as being developed with ease of use as it’s driving paradigm, while ignoring the need for many power-use options. There are just so few settings and options for configuring websites under IIS. However, as an ASP.Net developer we must deal with what we have. Luckily IIS7 appears to be finally filling in some of the major gaps left by previous incarnations of the product. The general modularity and API of IIS7 allows easy development of add-ins for controlling nearly every part of the Webserver process, much like Apache.
The IIS team has been hard at work releasing new modules for IIS7. This week they just released three new modules IIS7 PowerShell Provider CTP2, URL Rewrite Module CTP1, Application Request Routing CTP1. The third module is the one that sounds the most intriguing to me. This module will finally bring the the same functionality provided by modproxy, modloadbalance and modproxyhttp in an Apache environment.
For more information on all of this goodness read this blog post
New Modules for IIS7: Application Request Routing – Proxy and Load Balancing Module
4 Responses to “IIS7 Modules finally bring basic Apache functionality”
By Ryan Hadley on Jul 16, 2008 | Reply
Nice. I was expecting to be able to dig in to the details here and say “close, right direction, but not there yet”. But I’m impressed so far.
ARR has a nice persistence config, allowing you to choose the cookie even. And it has the ability to safely remove a server from a balancer by disallowing new connections and waiting for the others to die off.
I haven’t found SSL offloading yet though. That’d be a nice feature to have in IIS.
And URL Rewriting and Proxy options look pretty solid.
So I don’t get to stick my thumb on my nose and go “bppppppppppppt”.
By Cris Barbero on Jul 16, 2008 | Reply
Looks like SSL Offloading can be configured using specific rules in the underlying URL Rewrite module.
Enabling SSL Offloading
By Ryan Hadley on Jul 16, 2008 | Reply
This just in:
(01:11:33 PM) rhadley: so can iis6 be upgraded to 7?
(01:11:42 PM) Cris Barbero: don’t think so
(01:11:48 PM) Cris Barbero: think you need vista or server 2008
(01:11:50 PM) rhadley: gotta buy new os?
(01:11:53 PM) Cris Barbero: of course
(01:11:54 PM) rhadley: well
(01:11:56 PM) Cris Barbero: it’s M$
(01:12:05 PM) rhadley: so I DO get to stick my thumb on my nose and go “bpppppppppppppppppppt”
By Bill Staples on Jul 16, 2008 | Reply
Unfortunately the new features of IIS7 take advantage of some pretty fundamental changes in the OS which is one reason it was built to work only with Vista and Windows 2008. There are free evaluation versions available to try out, and there is built-in upgrade support from Windows 2003. Also, if you are looking for a migration / sync solution between IIS6 and IIS7, look no further than http://blogs.iis.net/msdeploy – another project the IIS team is shipping to make both the migration and web farm sync tasks easier.