IIS7 site and file synchronisation for web farms

If like us you have web farms of several machines serving a site in a cluster you may have come across the Microsoft Web Deployment tool.

This great bit of software allows you to sync all sites and their files from a master machine to all other members of the cluster automatically.

We have come across problems when a non administrator account is used for synchronising though.

To get round this we use the Web Management Service and a slightly different command line to sync with.

First, make sure the Web Management Service is on automatic and in Server Manager expand out the Roles/Web Server (IIS)/IIS Manager and choose the server instance, in the Management panel under Management Service you can enable remote connections. Then start/restart the service.

We then use a command line in this format:

msdeploy -verb:sync -source:webServer,wmsvc=192.168.0.1,username=user1,password=password1,includeAcls=true -dest:webServer,wmsvc=192.168.0.2,username=user2,password=password2 -enableLink:AppPoolExtension -allowUntrusted=true

As you can see the wmsvc service is used to authenticate, NTLM is the default authentication and if like us you use cloned servers the -allowUntrusted just bypasses the need to have an authorised certificate on the destination servers.

Just run multiple times in a batch for all the servers in the cluster and everything is all in sync!