Chapter 19. Web farm provisioning with the Web Farm Framework

 

Whether you’re hosting multiple websites for customers or a single mission-critical website for your business, provisioning (deploying), scaling, and managing your growing web environment can be challenging. Consider the difficulty of adding a single new server to a load balanced web farm. That requires you to install components and platforms to support the web applications—the additional management of websites, bindings, certificates, and content—which make adding a server or website a complicated and lengthy process.

In this chapter I discuss a solution that involves the technologies and concepts you’ve been working with from chapters 1417. By using Microsoft Application Request Routing (ARR), combined with the additional components Web Farm Framework (WFF) and Web Deploy, you can achieve an automated provisioning process for rapid (elastic) scaling and site management.

WFF is a collection of additional features, including PowerShell cmdlets, that makes the process of deploying and maintaining a web farm faster and easier to manage. You can use WFF with ARR for load balancing or without ARR if you have your own load balance solution.

WFF also offers administrators a collection of management tools to provide many of the WFF features:

  • One-step automated server provisioning
  • Automated deployment of new platforms to the web farm
  • Automated application deployment to the farm
  • Advanced status and trace logs

19.1. Implementing the Web Farm Framework with ARR

19.2. Building the web farm

19.3. Managing the web farm

19.4. Lab

19.5. Ideas to try on your own