Chapter 20. Disaster recovery for IIS

 

I hope this isn’t the first chapter you started to read when you picked up this book. I know that in the middle of a crisis, sometimes you turn immediately to the information you hope will help. This isn’t that chapter.

Here’s why: disaster recovery for IIS is a planning process, not an immediate fix for a failure. Part of this planning process requires that you fully understand the web environment you’re responsible for so you know what needs to be recovered in the event of a failure. To help accomplish that—and to become successful at disaster recovery—I hope you’ve been reading through the book, one chapter at a time, over your lunch, because then you’ll understand IIS and have a better understanding of what needs to be protected.

The best disaster-recovery planning starts with avoiding the disaster in the first place. I’ve focused almost a third of this book on high-availability solutions that will protect you from a server failure. No matter what size web environment you’re working with, you must implement some form of high availability, even if it’s only two servers in a simple Microsoft Network Load Balance with a Shared Configuration. Products such as the Web Farm Framework and Application Request Routing are excellent, free solutions for this.

20.1. Analyzing your environment for disaster recovery

20.2. Back up the critical components and data

20.3. Lab

20.4. Ideas to try on your own