Managing IIS configuration in a web farm

We’re now running 4 web servers and it’s starting to feel like we should consider centralising the IIS configuration. It’s now enough manual work that I can see a situation where one server in the farm ends up configured very slightly differently.

We still need to manage a migration to Windows Server 2008 / IIS7, and it looks like it might be best to complete this first then look at shared configuration management in IIS7. The good news is that we now have enough capacity that it shouldn’t be a problem to take a single server out of the load balancer, get it rebuilt to IIS7, then added back in.

It looks like any centralisation of either the metabase or content files is based on serving from a network share. I’d be interested to know to what degree this impacts performance, and the best way to do this while avoiding a single point of failure.

I think I’ll probably worry about getting everything on to IIS7 then look at the best way to achieve this.