Installing Web Deploy on IIS 7+ with Shared Configuration enabled

Question

We have a web farm environment running IIS 7.5 on Windows 2008R2. We use shared configuration and web storage replication.

We tried to install Web Deploy (v3.5) on one of the servers but receive an error message saying that Web Deploy is not supported with Shared Configuration.

Is it possible to run Web Deploy in a shared configuration environment? If so how?

NOTE: We have figured this out so I am posting the answer here. There is little to no documentation that we could find on this topic so I thought it best to host the info here so the rest of the world can easily find it.

Dutch

Answer 1

Yes Web Deploy can be installed on an IIS server using Shared Configuration. Here are the step we used to get it to work. Any comments, improvements or considerations are welcome.

1. Open IIS and select the server node in the tree.
2. Open the Shared Configuration in the Management section.
3. Uncheck Shared Configuration select Yes to copy the configuration to the local storage.
   • Do this to ALL servers that have been sharing configuration as you need to rebuild the configuration once Web Deploy is installed and reattach each server.
4. Install Web Deploy 3.5 (or newer) via the Web Platform Installer found here:
   • http://www.microsoft.com/web/gallery/install.aspx?appid=WDeploy
   • Installing Web Deploy will modify the authentication rules which will cause issues in a Shared Configuration environment so these rules need to be manually updated.
5. Open IIS and select the server node in the tree.
6. Open the Management Service Delegation module in the Management section (this module appears once Web Deploy is installed).
7. Edit the following rules and set the credentials to the a user that has access to the Shared Configuration. Typically a new account can be made that can be granted access to the Shared Configuration storage or use IIS service account. This will enable the web deployment agent to access the shared configuration with a domain account instead of the default local account.
   • createApp
   • recycleAPP
   • appPoolPipeline,appPoolNetFx
   • backupSettings
8. Restart the Web Deployment Agent service.
9. Restart the Web Management service.
10. Restart the IIS service.
11. Make sure you have disabled shared configuration on all servers.
12. Now to re-enable shared configuration, open IIS and select the server node in the tree.
13. Open the Shared Configuration in the Management section.
14. If this is the first server you need to export the configuration using the following steps (if not skip to next step):
    • Click Export Configuration...
    • Set the Physical Path to the shared configuration location and enter the appropriate encryption key.
    • You should see a success dialog if the export was successful.
15. Check Enable shared configuration.
16. Set the Physical Path to the shared configuration location and click Apply.
17. Enter the appropriate encryption key and click Ok.
18. Restart the IIS service.

You will then need to perform these steps again for each server using the shared configuration except you can skip step #14.

Dutch

Does this allow you to modify either server in the shared configuration (add or modify sites/applications/publishers etc.) and settings replicated to all servers (yes, like normal) - or will you need to export/import again when adding ACL's? Essentially, have you ran into any snags going this route? Sorry for asking a question that I could lab and figure out, I'm in a planning mode and it could take me a little while before I'm able to test. I would love feedback from someone already in this configuration if you're able to respond. Thanks for the write up! – Paschall

@Paschall Yes it will replicate settings, that is the point of shared configuration. You update one (add or modify an app) and the settings will replicate to all servers that are sharing the configuration. – Dutch