Deployment technique for deploying code on like 50 IIS webservers(asp.net and asp combination)

Question

Assume I have 20 servers , with websites setup on each server IIS.

The code is a mix of asp and asp.net

Now I have website code on each server for each website.// all the websites are same

Assume the website name is www.somewebsite1111.com(just for example)

If i want to deploy code to all the servers, I have to take each server out of load balancer deploy code and then do a IISreset and put back into load balancer, I have to repeat this for 20 times.

Soon the no of servers may become 50 , so the deployment time may take to much time to deploy on each server.

We can not just copy the code to all servers when the servers on load balancer for some reasons.

Based on your experience can you suggest some good solutions for deployment

Answer 1

If dealing with WebFarms you should really check out the new Web Farm Framework, free for download at: http://www.iis.net/download/webfarmframework

To see some info: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/09/08/introducing-the-microsoft-web-farm-framework.aspx

Answer 2

Haven't used it myself, but I think you might want to have a look at the IIS Web Deployment tool.

Answer 3

I recently worked on a project with the exact same scenario.

We had 29 web servers (behind web tier load balancer), and 15 app servers (behind app tier load balancer).

We used Group Policy (part of Windows Server - not sure if other Windows OS's have this)

Essentially, you specify which servers are in a particular pool/policy, then a software package can be executed against all of the servers in this pool.

Now, we used MSI's on the group policy console. So it depends how you are packaging/deploying your code. Group Policy is more aimed for "software" (e.g MSI, exe's, etc). Don't think you'd be able to use Web Deploy in this scenario.

Not sure if this is the latest/most recommended way of deploying to a load balanced environment, but thought i'd share my past experience.