Regardless of the load balancing and high availability technology you choose, supplying the web content to your websites becomes a challenge as your web farm grows. So far in this book you’ve had locally stored content (website files) on the web server for each of your websites. That becomes challenging in a web farm when you need to update or add to those files—you’ll find yourself running around copying files to each server in the farm. This chapter focuses on ways to make this process more manageable by automating the file copy process using PowerShell or Microsoft’s Distributed File System.
Content doesn’t have to be locally stored; it can be centralized in a single location and shared to all the web servers in the farm. This method creates a content server that the websites access for the website files and works well for both small and larger web farms. An increase in complexity is involved, so this solution may not be for everyone. But you’ll have a chance to decide for yourself.
This chapter focuses on three options for making your web farm content easier to manage. You’ll share website content to the farm from a single location using a network share and also using Microsoft’s Distributed File System (DFS).
By the end of this chapter you’ll have these options in your arsenal for managing content in your web farm. Let’s get started with deploying that content with PowerShell.