Windows 2003 Server

Windows 2003 Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) 6.0

IIS 6.0 incorporates significant architectural improvements to provides integrated, reliable, scalable, secure, and manageable Web server capabilities

Request-Processing Architecture

With the new request-processing architecture, IIS 6.0 automatically detects memory leaks, access violations, and other errors. When these conditions occur, the underlying architecture provides fault tolerance and the ability to restart processes as necessary. Meanwhile, IIS 6.0 continues to queue requests without interrupting the user experience.

Health Detection

IIS 6.0 is capable of monitoring the health of worker processes, applications, and Web sites. It can detect the status of worker process as well as recycle worker processes based on various factors including uptime, a designated schedule, number of requests, and memory consumption. Or it can recycle worker processes on demand.

Bandwidth throttling

Internet Information Services (IIS) 6.0 now uses the operating system to do bandwidth throttling. This allows IIS 6.0 to throttle individual host-header sites, enabling IIS 6.0 to send responses for a given site in parallel when bandwidth throttling is on (IIS 5.0 serialized each response).

Web Gardens

In Internet Information Services 6.0 (IIS), a Web garden is an application pool that has multiple worker processes serving the requests routed to that pool. A Web garden affinity is configurable between the worker processes serving it and a given set of processors on a multi-processor computer. Using Web gardens, Web applications have increased scalability because a software lock does not block all processors in the multi-processor computer. If one worker process serving an application pool experiences a shutdown, other work processes are still able to serve content and take over for the locked worker process.

Site Scalability

IIS 6.0 has improved the way the operating system uses internal resources. For example, IIS 6.0 does not pre-allocate resources at initialization time. Many more sites can be hosted on a single server running IIS 6.0, and a larger number of worker processes can be concurrently active. Starting up and shutting down a server is faster compared with earlier versions of IIS. All of these improvements contribute to increased site scalability with IIS 6.0.

New Kernel Mode Driver, HTTP.SYS

Windows Server 2003 introduces a new kernel mode driver, HTTP.SYS, for HTTP parsing and caching, providing increased scalability and performance. IIS 6.0 is built on top of HTTP.SYS and is specifically tuned to increase Web server throughput. In addition, HTTP.SYS directly processes requests in the kernel under specific circumstances.

Locked-down Server Out of the Box

IIS 6.0 provides significantly improved security. To reduce the attack surface of systems, IIS 6.0 is not installed by default on Windows Server 2003: administrators must explicitly select and install it. IIS 6.0 by default comes in a locked-down state, serving only static content. Using the Web service extension node, Web site administrators can enable or disable IIS functionality based on the individual customer's need.

Authorization

IIS 6.0 extends the use of a new authorization framework that comes with Windows Server 2003. In addition, Web applications can use URL authorization—in tandem with Authorization Manager—to control access. Constrained, delegated authorization now provides domain administrators with control to delegate only to particular computers and services.

XML Metabase

The XML-formatted, plain-text metabase in IIS 6.0 provides improved backup and restore capabilities for servers that experience critical failures. It also provides for improved troubleshooting and metabase corruption recovery. Direct editing, using common text editing tools, provides greater manageability.

ASP.NET and IIS Integration

Windows Server 2003 offers an improved developer experience with Microsoft ASP.NET and IIS integration. Building on IIS 6.0, Windows Server 2003 enhancements offer developers high levels of functionality, such as rapid application development (RAD) and a broad choice of languages. In Windows Server 2003, the experience of using ASP.NET and the Microsoft .NET Framework is improved because the request-processing architecture is integrated with IIS 6.0.

Share Information Across Geographical Boundaries

In the past, the non-Unicode structure of the HTTP protocol limited developers to the system codepage. Now, with URLs encoded by Unicode Transformation Format-8 (UTF-8), Unicode becomes possible, a benefit that provides the capability to support more complex languages such as Chinese. IIS 6.0 allows customers to access server variables in Unicode. It also adds new server support functions that allow developers access to the Unicode representation of a URL, thereby improving international support.

Summary

IIS 6.0 and Windows Server 2003 introduce many new features for Web application server management, availability, reliability, security, performance, and scalability. IIS 6.0 also enhances development and improves international support. Windows Server 2003 and IIS 6.0 provide a very dependable, productive, connected, and integrated Web server solution.