Hosting with Windows Server 2008

I had a great time at the Windows Server 2008 Hosting Roadshow in Sydney today. Since this event was quite fully booked out, I was actually quite lucky to be able to register for this event. Perhaps it was the Melbourne Cup? Thanks to the Philip Meyer and Jorke Odolphi, I had the chance to see some of the best features of the new IIS 7 and Windows Server 2008 working in harmony.

We used Microsoft Virtual PC 2007, to run two Windows Server guest machines at the same time. It’s really quite convenient since you now don’t need an entire computer lab to play with Windows networking. We had a tour around the new IIS 7, including the new modularised design. A fresh installation is secure by default with only the minimum number of modules. Less junk means less things to go wrong.

Creating, backing up and restoring 4000 web sites was really not that tedious after all. It only took 30 seconds to create them all! It can even be done using the command line.

Perhaps the most interesting feature that opens up a new world of possibilities is that IIS 7 now stores its configuration as an XML file rather than a metabase as it has done in the past. This makes the configuration much easier to reproduce and to restore. It allows what’s called “Shared Configuration”, where multiple servers in a farm uses the same configuration so that all configured servers can now host the same websites. Again, it really isn’t that difficult to set up!