This week we shipped IIS 7.0 Beta 3 as part of the Windows "Longhorn" Server release. IIS 7.0 is the biggest release of IIS in the history of the product, and brings with it major improvements to the Microsoft web-server stack. This article and this blog post list just a few of the major improvements it delivers.
New IIS 7.0 Beta3 Features
This week's IIS 7.0 Beta3 release introduces a bunch of new features and capabilities above and beyond what shipped in the IIS 7.0 release that came with Windows Vista. These include:
- Web Farm Shared Configuration: You can now configure your web-servers to be stateless, and centralize all configuration, code and content across web farms (making it much easier to scale out and manage). Learn more about how to use this new feature here.
- Delegated Remote Administration: You can now use the IIS7 admin tool to remotely manage web-servers over HTTP/SSL. Server administrators can now lock down and "delegate" settings to site administrators - enabling much more fine-grained control over who can manage sites on the machine (ideal for hosted scenarios).
- Automatic Application Pool Isolation: IIS 7.0 makes it much easier to provision and isolate application pool worker processes on the web-server. This is ideal for hosting scenarios, as well as enterprise scenarios where you want complete isolation and sandboxing between applications.
- Built-in FastCGI Support for PHP and other extensions: In addition to providing rich .NET extensibility, IIS 7.0 now ships with built-in support for FastCGI extensions - making it easy to use with dynamic web server frameworks like PHP.
- New FTP Server: The new IIS7 FTP Server now adds support for secure publishing with FTP/SSL, host header FTP support, integrated admin tool support, and support for plugable authentication (using the same provider model as the ASP.NET Membership system).
Make sure to check out Bill Staples' blog post here to learn more about all the above features.
IIS 7.0 Go Live License
After months of stress testing in our labs, we think IS7 is now ready for broad customer deployments. To facilitate this, Microsoft is now offering a special Go-Live License for IIS7 and Windows Server "Longhorn" Beta3. This allows you to deploy IIS7 servers into production environments immediately (note: we have already deployed www.microsoft.com on this build).
You can learn more about the IIS7 go-live license, as well as how to freely download Windows Server "Longhorn" Beta3 here.
Alternatively, you can also sign-up for a free IIS7 Beta Hosting Account from one of several web hosters who have deployed IIS7 Beta3 already. You can learn more about their free IIS7 offers here.
Hope this helps,
Scott