How to deploy an asp.net webApp to multiple servers?
Deploy Web Applications Using the Copy Web Tool
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What method do you use to deploy ASP.Net applications to the wild?
It depends how many servers you're talking about.
For less than about 4 or 5 servers, I just zip the application, copy to each server, unzip into a new folder, and tell IIS to look at the new folder, using IIS Manager. In a load-balanced environment, it also means taking all servers except one offline, and then updating them one at a time, and bringing them back online afterwards.
For more servers than that, I prefer to use Windows Deployment Services (WDS).
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I've a dedicated machine with at least 6 diferent asp.net 4.5 applications where the developer deployed compiled versions. This apps are all working fine now, but I haven't access to source code.
Now I want to deploy this apps to Azure, but not to a VM, to an Azure Web App Service. Is it posible?
Thanks in advance!!!
Quite possibly. We can't say for sure without more information.
You'll need to FTP all files from your existing root directory/directories to your new Web App. If it's a vanilla ASP.NET web app and there aren't any dependent issues (such as databases on other servers that you cannot move or poke holes through firewalls), it should work.
There are many considerations. For instance, if the applications have dependencies on specific drive letters, you won't be able to mount those drives.
This is just one example, you can take a look at the restrictions that are imposed on Web Apps: https://github.com/projectkudu/kudu/wiki/Azure-Web-App-sandbox
The best way to know, is to create a new site, deploy the files, and see what breaks.
Is it possible to publish an ASP.NET (core) application to a running site on IIS 8 without having to stop and start the website manually?
Visual Studio 2015 keeps giving the error that a file is in use. I'm using publish to the file system, because my Web Deploy to a server in our network fails at the end with an error that it cannot authenticate on the server with port 443.
I don't mind IIS having to recycle the application pool, but when I constantly have to put the app down, publish (which takes about a minute) and restart it, it's not really good for the users.
Another option would be something like 2 websites running the same application, but only if this is automatable. Then it would put down 1 of the 2, update this, put it on, put down the second, update this and start it.
A third option is something like a hot update, where I could just update the application while it being on.
Can anyone point me in the right direction (perhaps some blog posts), because my Google searches didn't give me any good information?
If you copy a file called app_offline.htm to the application folder IIS will gracefully stop your application and start serving the contents of the app_offline.htm file. When application is stopped you can copy your files. After files are copied remove the app_offline.htm file and IIS will start your app. VS does that for you when you deploy to Azure but not when deploying to file system.
You mention "two websites running the same application". Do you mean two web servers hosting the same app?
If you already have multiple web servers (a.k.a. cluster of servers, or web farm), you can simply take some servers out of the cluster and update them. That is how we push out our updates. We use software from Citrix for managing the server farm. It also handles load balancing. This type of software allows one to monitor the servers, so you can determine when all the users have "moved" off the web servers (that were recently taken out of cluster). Then you can iisreset, deploy the new build, and move on to the next server (or set of servers, depending on your configuration). We have more than 20 virtual web servers. Typically we take down half of the servers, update them, and take the other half down as we put the first half back in the cluster/farm. This should allow for uninterrupted service. I understand you want to automate the process. I'll assume you're using Windows NLB (network load balancing). You could write a PowerShell script to automate taking down the servers. Here's a reference:
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee817138
I understand this may be viewed as a workaround. I'm not sure if recycling the app pool is always necessary with ASP.NET Core. I wasn't able to find a definitive answer. Most production applications should be on more than one web server anyway. Even if you don't have a lot of users, you should have multiple web servers for failover purposes.
I've created an Azure server instance. I've deployed a simple application to it. As part of the deployment process I enabled Remote Desktop Connections.
I have some standard ASP.net applications that run on Windows, is there something to stop me deploying these applications manually to IIS using Remote Desktop. I've read so much about having to migrate standard ASP.net apps to Azure. I don't want to this as we will have customers who will still use Windows Server 2003/2008 so I don't want to have to maintain 2 versions.
Well, as I understand it, in theory you could deploy stuff using remote desktop. But when the instance shuts down/restarts you'll lose it all (unless you've built it into your startup scripts) and have to re-load everything each time. The main reason they suggest you have at least two instances is so that when one shuts down for updates etc there is always at least one other running.
The "Windows Azure Accelerator for Web Roles" project allows you to create an Azure web role which then enables you to use web deploy for all your other web sites - I'm guessing that will be a whole lot better approach and is definitely worth a look. Also, I believe smarx.com is a good place to browse for info and ideas.
Using a startup task and the Azure Bootstrapper you can download, unzip, install almost any kind of 3rd party software that supports either xcopy deployment (just copy the files) or an unattended(silent) install.
Assuming you aren't using Azure storage or anything like that, there shouldn't be any difference with the IIS application. If you are using anything specific to Azure, you can use the RoleEnvironment.IsAvailable to test if you are running inside Azure or not. That will return true for the emulator as well. If you want to use Azure storage from both, you can add the settings in the web.config to use if not running in Azure.
We need to deploy our asp.net web site in web farm which consists of 16 web servers. Whenever we need to roll out a new release it is very time consuming and tedious as we need to deploy it first on the DR environment (16 web servers) and then on to Live environment (16 web servers).
Currently we prepare the msi on our build server and copy it on all the front end web servers which involves first FTPing the msi to a common location on hosting network and then copying from the common location to each server.
After thet we backup the existing website and then run the installer one by one on each machine.
After installing the new version we replace the web.config file with the older one as it is encrypted and hardly contains any new thing in it as part of new release. This saves us from encrypting the web.config file again.
Could somebody please suggest a better way of doing this deployement as it is really turning out to be time consuming. Previously this model was ok for us as we had only 4 web servers but not it is no longer a sutable option.
Thanks..
Take a look at the Web Farm Framework. It will handle the replication of your application across your entire farm.
Another option is to use the "Shared Configuration" option in IIS7 as well as a DFS share to replicate all of your files and metabase configuration. This just won't handle registry changes or the GAC.
I have a presentation web farm with four load-balanced servers. I have one web application with two website domains that represent that application. Rather than constantly push to two different folder locations, I figured I can push to one location and have a virtual directory on each website point to the single folder on the webserver.
Here is the setup:
The load balancer is CoyotePoint. The web framework is asp.net 3.5. IIS 6 (slowing moving to 7).
I'm concerned about performance in a production environment. Are there any ramifications to having two websites with virtual directories pointing to the same directory on disk? Should I also be worried about application pools?
I think I found what I was looking for. It's called CentralizedWebFarmManagement for IIS. Specifically, I think the Shared-configuration, and Web Deployment Tools for Web Farm is exactly what I need!
It depends on what this application is doing. If you're doing anything at all fancy with System.IO you're going to run into issues.
There are other ways to make the pushing of files easier. I highly recommend creating a quick bat file with a few robocopy commands in it.