Contents

Evolution of IIS............................................................................................................ 1
Application Pool.......................................................................................................... 1
Website....................................................................................................................... 2
Application.................................................................................................................. 2
WEB FARM.................................................................................................................. 2
WEB GARDEN............................................................................................................. 2
VIRTUAL DIRECTORY................................................................................................... 3
IIS CONFIGURATION.................................................................................................... 3

Evolution of IIS
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IIS
IIS
IIS
IIS

6 (Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP 64 bit only)

7 (Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista)
7.5 (Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7)
8 (Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8)

Application Pool
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Application Pools are logical groupings of web applications

One App Pool represents a windows worker process
App Pool may be configured in a way that an application runs as a separate
process or a group of application runs in one process
The Application Pool is the heart of a website.
Application Pools provide isolation, better security, reliability and availability.
An Application Pool with multiple worker processes is called a Web Garden.
App Pool isolates the application from applications in other application pools
on the server.

Website
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A site can have more than one application.

Each site must have an application which is named the root application, or
default application.
All web applications under a website share the same port number

Application
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An application is a group of files that delivers content or provides services

over HTTP.
An application belongs to a site and an application pool
Each application must have a virtual directory

Hierarchical relationship
A site contains one or more applications, an application contains one or more virtual
directories, and a virtual directory maps to a physical directory on a computer.

WEB FARM
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A hosting environment consisting of multiple web servers is said to be a Web

Farm.
A load balancer routes incoming requests amongst the servers within the web
farm.
fail-safe
reliability

WEB GARDEN
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Web garden is a scenario in which a single machine has multiple asp.net

worker processes running simultaneously.
A web garden is utilized on a multi-core web server.
Each worker process within the application pool would execute on an
individual processor.

Availability
Less space
Better capacity
Optimum utilization of processes running on multiple processors located in a
single server

Finer grained partitioning of Web servers help to control the administration of

web sites individually, though they reside on the same server

VIRTUAL DIRECTORY
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A virtual directory is a directory name that you specify in IIS and map to a
physical directory on a local or remote server.
The directory name then becomes part of the application's URL
An application can have more than one virtual directory

IIS CONFIGURATION

Consider a web setup like the above image.

We can infer that there are two websites configured
1. Default website (port : 80)
2. Cloud website (port : 81)
The default website can be accessed using urls
http://localhost/home.html
OR
http://sunil/home.html (sunil being the server name)
OR
http://sunil:80/home.html
OR

http://10.106.104.25/home.html

It can be noted that API and Web are two web applications configured under the
Cloud website.
The two web applications can be accessed using below urls
http://localhost:81/Web/home.html
http://localhost:81/API/home.html
Note the two web applications sharing the same port number