Difference between IIS 6.0 vs IIS 7.0

Question

We are using Windows 2003 server with IIS 6.0 and thinking of migrating to Window Server 2008 with IIS 7.0 to host our .Net applications

Is anyone aware what are the benefits or drawbacks of it?

Answer 1

The biggest benefit is the Integrated Pipeline.

How to Take Advantage of the IIS 7.0 Integrated Pipeline

IIS 6.0 and previous versions allowed the development of .NET application components via the ASP.NET platform. ASP.NET integrated with IIS via an ISAPI extension, and exposed its own application and request processing model. This effectively exposed two separate server pipelines, one for native ISAPI filters and extension components, and another for managed application components. ASP.NET components would execute entirely inside the ASP.NET ISAPI extension bubble and only for requests mapped to ASP.NET in the IIS script map configuration.

IIS 7.0 integrates the ASP.NET runtime with the core web server, providing a unified request processing pipeline that is exposed to both native and managed components known as modules.

The many benefits of integration include:

Allowing services provided by both native and managed modules to apply to all requests, regardless of handler. For example, managed Forms Authentication can be used for all content, including ASP pages, CGIs, and static files.

Empowering ASP.NET components to provide functionality that was previously unavailable to them due to their placement in the server pipeline. For example, a managed module providing request rewriting functionality can rewrite the request prior to any server processing, including authentication.

A single place to implement, configure, monitor and support server features such as single module and handler mapping configuration, single custom errors configuration, single url authorization configuration.

Answer 2

One definite benefit is the new "Integrated Mode" on application pools. This allows asp.net to hook into the pipeline earlier than was possible in iis6. Some of our applications use this to do url rewriting for files which was previous impossible with out adding a wildcard extension mapping to the asp.net dll.

Another feature that I've found useful is remote management. I believe remote management may have been available in iis 6, but if so it has been cleaned up and improved for iis 7. The basic idea is that you can allow an authorized remote user to connect to iis and manage almost every feature of iis.

Ssl host headers were also cleaned up in iis 7. You can now add ssl certs to the server rather than to a site. Certs are bound to sites and https host headers through the bindings dialog just like http bindings. This has the added advantage of making it very simple to quickly deploy one cert for multiple sites.

One (hopefully last) Edit:

Microsoft has released a tool for web deployment which offers migration tools for iis6 to iis7. If you decide to move ahead with it I strongly recommend downloading it (here) and reading the migration instructions here.

We went through the same process about a year ago and I have been very happy with the results.

Answer 3

Just a few things I have found useful:

• IIS 7 enables you to rewrite your URLs via Web.Config <rewrite><rules>
• You can now restart just one website if you need to rather than restarting IIS.
• Much better UI
• Better PHP integration - http://php.iis.net/

Answer 4

One big thing we found during our migration was that editing the applicationhost.config file was more successful than using the IIS manager itself.

There were a lot of changes that had to be made for our apps. I would start testing early.