How do you manage large web farms?

Posted by Andrew Katz on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Andrew Katz
Published on 2010-07-28T15:17:26Z Indexed on 2012/11/26 23:08 UTC
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iis

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Web

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web-farm

I have a quickly growing web farm running IIS 7 (30+ servers). All servers are identical copies of each other and all servers are physical. We update the software about once a month, and in the current process, we follow the following steps:

Disable server from pool on F5 load balancer.
Disable HTTP Keep-alives in IIS so connections drop quickly.
Change default directory of website to new folder containing new binaries.
Test server
Enable HTTP Keep-alives.
Enable server in F5 pool.
Move to server 2

Microsoft used to have Application Center which was abandoned a while ago. They have made a second attempt with the Web Farm Framework, but this adds as much QA time testing the release package as it saves in the deployment.

Has anyone seen a commercial off the shelf application that is tailored for managing and deploying to large web farms?

Thanks!

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