How to migrate to Azure from IIS - windows

Are there any tools or processes available for migrating the services which got deployed in IIS to Windows Azure Cloud space. Is there any way to take snapshot/image of a set of virtual directories and move it to Windows Azure?
-Mahender

There are several ways to run an IIS web site on Windows Azure (see http://davidpallmann.blogspot.com/2012/07/windows-azure-is-3-lane-highway-how-to.html for a comparison).
Windows Azure Web Sites
Cloud Services (Platform-as-a-Service) - Hosted Service
Virtual Machines (Infrastructure-as-a-Service)
If your requirement is to copy files up and be done with it, option 1 (WAWS) and option 3 (Virtual Machines) allow that. You can upload files by FTP for WAWS, and through a remote desktop connection for VMs. However, note that WAWS does not support multiple virtual directories or any kind of custom IIS configuration. And with Virtual Machines, you have the responsibility of managing your VMs yourself.
I recommend going through the hands-on labs in the Windows Azure Training Kit (downloadable from azure.com) to see what's involved in setting up web sites using these different approaches to determine which is the best fit for you.

Related

Load an AWS instance upon local windows booting up

Our company in moving into Amazon WorkSpaces. We all currently have normal desktop computers winning Windows 7. There are a couple of us who will need local windows and will also be working in the WorkSpace. There are others who will only need to work in there Amazon WorkSpace environment. Is there a way to automatically boot the workspace instance upon windows loading and then when the instance is closed it will shut down windows. Essentially denying those users access to the local copy of windows.
Would also need a way for an administrator to access the local Windows..
Thanks
Looks like what i am trying to do is available in a function that Windows provides. I will look into the functionality of the "Kiosk" function that is available in Windows 7.

Easy setup wizard for Ruby-on-Rails app + web server on windows

I'm developing a Ruby-on-Rails app which uses MS SQL Server db. I will need to automate the deployment to Windows servers because it will be distributed through different channels and the setup needs to be as automatic as possible. I have read that IIS is not a good solution so the setup process would need to install a web server (apache, Nginx or thin). I haven't used JRuby but I have heard it might make matters simpler on Windows.
Is there any good resources, software packages or suggestions on how this can be solved?
Johann

IIS7 website deployment stopping file sharing?

I have several windows shares hosted on a PC running Win7x64. This machine is also hosting a basic website via IIS7. Whenever I deploy a new copy of the website to IIS any WinXP users connected to the shares on that machine get disconected.
After some period of time (20mins or so) the shares all start working again.
This only seems to affect WinXP clients, with them recieving this error message described here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/890413.
The resolution provided by Microsoft works, but it means that everything I deploy a new copy of the website all of my users have to go through this hassle.
Any IIS experts out there know what is happening, or how to resolve this?
Thanks

ec2 workflow microsoft / apple

I'm switching over to EC2 and obviously it's easiest to manage instances through a command line rather than some crappy web interface, but I work on a PC and have everything set up in Windows. What is the best way to work with dev server instances? Putty? Is there an alternative? What do you guys use?
Thanks!
It depends what you mean by "manage instances".
If you mean the ability to launch new instances from an AMI, configure security groups, manage EIP's and so on, the ElasticFox plugin to Firefox is great (in spite of having occasionally buggy releases). The command line tools supplied by Amazon for this purpose could be a good basis if you're writing automated scripts, but I find ElasticFox much better for my work.
To work directly on the instances, I use WinSCP for both Windows and Linux instances (I installed a third-party SFTP server for Windows), PuTTY for Linux and Remote Desktop for Windows.
I manage both Linux and Windows EC2 instances for a couple of different businesses.
For the Windows boxes I normally connect via Remote Desktop to do virtually everything. For Linux I use WinSCP and PuTTY consoles.
For EC2-specific operations I use the Amazon web console or the Amazon-supplied scripts from my PC.

What's the best way to develop against WordPress on Windows when you already have IIS/SQL Server installed?

If you want to develop against WordPress (i.e., have a local instance running on your machine so you can develop themes, get blogs and sites laid out, etc.) and you're running Windows on your development machine with IIS and SQL Server already installed, what's the best way to do it?
I found a method online which sets up a little "mini" server on Windows running instances of Apache and MySQL but they didn't advise using it on a machine with IIS already installed. Obviously one could install Apache and MySQL and do it that way but given what Windows affords you (i.e., methods of running PHP in IIS - I think Windows Server 2008 is even optimized for this), is that the best way? Are there ways to run WordPress with SQL Server as the backend? (I wouldn't think so but I thought I'd throw that out there).
And are there methods differing on the version of Windows (i.e., XP, Vista, Vista64)
I run XAMPP on a thumbdrive and install WordPress (usually multiple instances of it) on there. Then I start up XAMPP when I'm going to work on Wordpress development.
EDIT: this setup does require that IIS be stopped when the XAMPP server is running (or some byzantine configuration magic that I've never bothered to figure out. Since most of my personal needs for local IIS development are handled by the Visual Studio built-in instance of IIS, which can run side-by-side with XAMPP, I rarely have bother with anything else, but that probably won't work for everyone.
Install PHP, run Wordpress in IIS. Install MySQL which can be run side-by-side with MSSQL. The only thing you'll miss using IIS over Apache is mod_rewrite for prettier URLs.
Avoid running IIS and Apache on the same machine if at all possible. IIS likes to bind to all available IPs blocking Apache from binding to an IP, which you can get around if necessary, but it's not immediately clear what's happening.
I've been running this setup for years.
Since you are interested in developing for Wordpress I strongly suggest you use the most common WP setup: Apache, PHP and MySQL.
You can run Apache and IIS at the same time (I have IIS listening on port 81 and Apache on 80) or you can run only one at a time (create 2 bat files to start/stop the servers using the net start/stop command).
You can use IIS, PHP, MySQL to run Wordpress but there are some subtle differences that can drive you crazy or cause problems when you deploy on Apache.
You can certainly run IIS and Apache on the same box. We do it currently with Documentum/Apache and IIS on the same server. Just pick a range of addresses for one web server - 808x for Apache for example.
You should also consider using Thinstall from VMWare where you can virutalize an entire application - registry, .Net and all - distribute as a single .EXE. We do this now for packaging applications that don't play well together. You might want to virtualize Wordpress/Appache/MySql and set an IP (808x) for that configuration. This way you can move this to any server with IIS and it'll play well with different configurations.

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