Microsoft.com now running on Windows Server 2008 Beta 3

Microsoft has recently switched its main website, www.microsoft.com to Windows Server 2008 and Microsoft-IIS/7.0. Microsoft.com is the 5^th most trafficked site in the world, 4^th most in the US. The site is supported by roughly 80 Web servers delivering content daily to around 287M unique users via +300k concurrent connections at a rate of over 10k requests per second.

The Operations team for MSCom had been playing with IIS7 since its early beta builds and recently finished deploying the new Web server in Windows Server 2008 Beta 3 to all its production servers.

Although Windows Server 2008 is not yet released, Beta 3 is publicly available for early adopters to use. Internet Information Server 7 is already released, but will probably not see widespread use until Windows Server 2008 (formerly “Longhorn”) is released, since it only runs on Windows Server 2008 or Windows Vista.

There are already around 2,600 sites running Windows Server 2008 on the Internet. Whilst some of the servers running Windows Server 2008 are at Microsoft itself, the majority are not, with developers and hosting companies taking advantage of Windows Server 2008’s availability under a Go Live license which allows the beta to be used for testing or in a live environment without cost.

Windows Server 2008 is due to be released in the second half of 2007, although there has been media speculation – fueled by the 2008 name – that a release may be at the end of that period. Once it is released, it could be expected to take a long time for large numbers of sites to move over to the latest version; it took several years for the installed base of Windows Server 2003 to overtake Windows 2000, and there are still some 5 million sites running on Windows 2000 even today.

Highlights on IIS 7

1. Module Based Installation
2. IIS Metabase Compatibility component
3. XML Configuration File don’t contain machine specific settings
4. Delegated, Remote Administration
5. Built-in FastCGI support for PHP and other dynamic languages
6. FTP server includes secure publishing with FTP/SSL support