Developer Notes

Migrating sites from IIS7 to IIS8

Posted 15 May 2014

I was recently tasked with migrating a bunch of sites from a Windows 2008 server to a Windows 2012 server. I expected this to be a well know path but it’s not. I tried to use WebDeploy, it’s a complete disaster.

I ended up cherry-picking IIS configuration backups in a merge tool. Not pretty but it worked like a charm.

What’s wrong with WebDeploy

WebDeploy is mostly an automation tool for deploying websites. It assumes a bunch of things. For example that you already created the site and the apppool. I am not looking to do that by hand 20 times or so.

It also seems to be incapable of creating virtual directories etc. In effect, a deployment package for a site seems to contain only files, none of the IIS structural configuration that’s so tedious to setup by hand.

Looking for ways to migrate the IIS configuration itself I found that WebDeploy supports server level packages too. This seems to create a package with all sites and a whole slew of configuration data. Great, or so I thought.

When I tried to deploy that on the server I found that IIS would no longer work. At all.

WebDeploy had messed up the .NET Framework configuration files, machine wide!

The alternative

I was not looking forward to manually configuring 15 sites with their app pools, virtual directories and all that. The chances of me messing that up in multiple places are 100%.

So I started looking into IIS’ built-in backup functionality:

%windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd add backup "migration" 

This creates a backup of the IIS configuration in

%windir%\system32\inetsrv\backup\migration

The backup consists of XML files and being a developer, I know how to deal with XML.

Next step is to create a backup on the destination server. I named that ‘Pre-Migration’ and copied it to ‘Migration’ so I would have a version to return to.

The file that has the actual site configurations is applicationHost.config, and is mostly compatible between IIS7 and IIS8. The XML is pretty straight forward and I was able to merge the bits I wanted into the backup file on the new server.

The relevant sections are:

• applicationPools
• sites
• locations

Now restore the backup:

%windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd restore backup "migration"