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AS OF 12/4/2008 12:31AM EST

The Microsoft Stack: Trying to Bring Order to Chaos
By Patrick Hynds

August 15, 2008 — If you are, or have ever been, in charge of a large data center supporting Web applications, then you most likely have seen the delicate balance between everything working and nothing working.

IT seems to be fraught with horror stories, but it seems that the Web farm and Web data center ones are particularly gruesome. This is because nowhere in the enterprise are so many rival factions of technology brought together than in a Web servicing data center.

There are some cases where this is not that bad, especially when there is some homogeneity. The worst cases are when there are dozens of servers, each hosting individual production sites and each with their own groups of developers, Webmasters and database administrators putting in their own “best practices.” For this reason, I would never take a job running a data center for a Web-hosting company.

The only exception that might make me rethink that stance is good tooling such as the Windows-based Hosting version 4.5 that Microsoft has pulled together. It isn’t a specific product, but several products, technologies, scripts and utilities documented like a resource kit in the style of what we had back in the early Windows NT days.

If you have ever read an IBM Redbook or used the Patterns and Practices documentation from Microsoft, then you already have seen something like this offering. The latter reads like a blueprint to creating the IT plan for a company that does windows hosting, and even offers several scenarios including Discount Dedicated Hosting, Managed Dedicated Hosting, Shared Web Hosting (the scariest) and Application Hosting. Of these, Application Hosting is the most interesting if you are not working for a company in the business of hosting sites for customers.

I was pleasantly surprised by how deep the documentation goes. It literally is a guide to running the back end of a Web hosting business, and it includes processes, staffing and even automation tasks such as automatic provisioning, similar to what you see if you have ever set up a dedicated hosted server from one of the many ISPs that provide this service. I use SRAWeb.net for a couple of dedicated servers I use, and I wondered about the back end when I clicked on that provision button on their interface.

There is also a Technology Best Practices section that talks about everything from Active Directory to SharePoint. There is a section under Best Practices for ISA Server, but it was confusing and incomplete. It referenced ISA Server 2004 on the menu, but the text referred to 2006 and had a lot of blank resource lists and even a screenshot of ISA Server 2004’s Getting Started page. This was clearly the low point in the documentation itself.

While I was impressed that the guidance existed at all, there were a couple of other troubling issues, aside from the ISA Server issue mentioned earlier. For instance, the guidance downloads as a compressed HTML file in CHM format, but I had trouble opening the individual pages, most likely because Internet Explorer 7 has problems with CHM files. To get around that, I extracted the file to actual HTML by running the HTML Help utility with the following syntax:

hh.exe -decompile extracted WbH_4_5_Help.chm

If you have to resort to this, then you could be in for a very bad user experience, as the pages expand into a flat directory structure and I could not find an index page that had all the links. So, get ready to browse by name (hint start with CMSU_ALL_Overview
_INTRO_Get_Started_with_Windows-based_Hosting.htm). The only saving grace here is that the document is currently available online at www.microsoft.com/technet/serviceproviders/wbh4_5/default.mspx?mfr=true.

Also, I was a bit disappointed that it didn't go further in helping people understand some of the thornier issues, including performance and security. Of course, Active Directory is in the model and the security settings in IIS are very configurable, but in the area of performance, for instance, I don’t see how you could run a Web farm now without looking at optimizing the traffic using a StrangeLoop appliance. I will make a note to cover the performance side of Web farms in a future column and will provide an overview of why I think leaving out third-party products like StrangeLoop is a mistake.

Overall, I want to see Microsoft doing more of this kind of documentation. Often, the biggest complaint is not that the products and technologies are not feature-rich enough, but more that people are overwhelmed by them and do not know where to start.

You never know where Microsoft has gone to great lengths to prepare for you until you look around. The Microsoft Solution for Windows-based Hosting Version 4.5 appears to be the best-kept secret since the Microsoft Solution for Hosted Messaging and Collaboration 4.5, but that is something we can take up another day. Happy hosting!

Patrick Hynds, president of CriticalSites and a Microsoft Regional Director, can be reached at phynds@criticalsites.com.

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