By Michael K. Campbell
More than any product that has come out of Microsoft in awhile, I’m very excited about Windows Server 2008; mostly because of just how great Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.0 is. I’ve been using IIS 7 for a number of years along with ASP.NET, and the new IIS 7 architecture goes leaps and bounds towards making ASP.NET a first-class application, and does the same for PHP and virtually all other web workloads. It also offers a number of really cool and exciting management options – including a completely re-written MMC, and the ability to delegate approved admin functionality to trusted parties.
In Automating Internet Information Services 7.0, you can also get a good overview of some of the scripting, automation, and remote management options for IIS 7.
Based upon some of the introductory information and abstracts about this webcast, I assumed that much of it would be old news to me as I’ve actually presented on some of the automation and scripting benefits provided by IIS 7 at a few road-shows in the past. And, while much of it was new for me, I found that there were some great “unexpected” tidbits in this webcast as well. So if IIS 7 scripting and management is “old-hat” to you as well, you’ll still find some things worth your while in this webcast. Even better, if IIS 7 automation is something you aren’t familiar with and which you’re contemplating with the upcoming release of Windows Server 2008, then this webcast will give you a great overview of some of the options and possibilities available to you.
This webcast quickly gets to work outlining some of the benefits and specifics of an entirely new approach to IIS 7 management with a new managed-code administration API that Microsoft will be releasing this year (known as MWA):
The webcast then drops into a couple of demonstrations of how to use this new API from PowerShell:
Interestingly enough, the demo actually goes wrong for a second – at least initially. But as much as I hate that when I’m presenting, I usually find that when that happens and I’m observing, I usually learn more – as many of the assumptions that the presenter is making frequently become “unmasked”. That was definitely the case here.
TIP: PowerShell requires that the MWA assemblies be explicitly loaded into PowerShell before you can use it - and this webcast shows you (in a couple of places) how to dynamically load CLR assemblies into PowerShell using System.Net.Reflection.
Along with showing how to use the new MWA Management Provider from the PowerShell command prompt, this webcast also outlines some tips and best practices for using this up-and-coming management interface. It also provides some high level information about extending MWA as well.
At a few points during the demonstration, the presenter quickly moved past some new FTP management instrumentation in the IIS Manager GUI, but then came back to those new points and talked for a few minutes about how FTP is going to be integrated into the release builds – as well as how to get those builds now. I thought this was pretty cool because I’ve just been too busy of late to get out and look at these new FTP improvements in the latest builds – but they’re something that I’ve been definitely interested in given how easy FTP management will end up being under IIS 7.
True to the name of this webcast, it also displays some high-level overviews of how to utilize WMI and AppCmd.exe to manage IIS 7. In addition to showing simple demos of how to use these tools from the command line, this presentation also explains some of the pain points that these tools try to address and how they’re intended to improve in the future (specifically WMI and PowerShell2).
One part of this presentation that I really liked though was a section detailing how to use batch files with AppCmd:
It was nice to see some simple examples of how that’s done and caused me to think about ways that I could leverage batch files (with optional parameters) written against AppCmd to meet my own needs.
TIP: AppCmd batch files created on Windows 2008 hosts can be moved onto Server Core deployments and used there to help automate common interactions.
This presentation also touches a good deal on managing Server Core deployments (where there is no GUI), and offers some great insights. Likewise, the presenter also provides some best practices for Server Core Management – including an overview of why you want to use OCList and OCSetup to manage Server Core features instead of using Package Manager.
Then, to top everything off, this presentation finishes with some high-level overviews and ideas about how to manage remote deployments – covering specifics about which kinds of operations are supported or not through a handful of remote management scenarios.
If you’re new to IIS 7 or scripting automation and remote management, or you want to learn more about the release dates of the new IIS FTP builds or the new and upcoming Web Management APIs, then head over and watch the Automating Internet Information Services 7.0 webcast.