Websites and web services are used for everything these days. With the evolution of Cloud, we are accessing more and more via web browsers than we ever have before. The cloud can mean very different things to different people, but what I see most commonly in Enterprise is the creation of private clouds. This generally means a collection of web servers that are being used to serve up web applications for the company's user population to work from. Sometimes, the private cloud is onsite in a company's data center; sometimes it is in a co-location; and sometimes it is a combination of local data center and a true cloud web service provider such as Azure. Whatever defines a private cloud for you, one variable is the same. Your cloud includes web servers that need to be managed and administered.
For any Microsoft-centric shop, your web servers should be running Windows Server with the Internet Information Services (IIS) role installed. IIS is the website platform in Windows Server 2016, and with it we can run any kind of website or web service that we need. The hope for this collection of recipes is to give you a solid foundation to understand the way that websites work within IIS. Even if you don't normally set up new web services, you may very well have to troubleshoot one. Becoming familiar with the console and options, and just understanding the parts and pieces, can be hugely beneficial to anyone administering servers in a Windows environment. In this chapter, we will cover following recipes:
- Installing the Web Server role with PowerShell
- Launching your first website
- Changing the port on which your website runs
- Adding encryption to your website
- Using a Certificate Signing Request to acquire your SSL certificate
- Moving an SSL certificate from one server to another
- Rebinding your renewed certificates automatically
- Hosting multiple websites on your IIS server
- Using host headers to manage multiple websites on a single IP address
If you have been reading through this recipe book from start to finish, you probably noticed that we utilize our new web server a lot when testing or rounding out tasks in our infrastructure. So our web server has a whole bunch of things on it that have been pushed down as a result of regular network tasks that we have done, but we aren't doing any actual web serving with it yet!
We are going to assume, for most tasks in this chapter, that the role for IIS is already installed on the web server. This role is specifically called Web Server (IIS) in the list of roles, and there are numerous additional features that we can add to IIS. For all of our recipes, we only need the defaults added, the ones that are selected automatically when installing the role. That role installation is the only thing a Windows Server 2016 box needs in order to serve up web pages to users, other than a little bit of knowledge of how to get the site doing what you want it to do. In order to get the role installed properly, make sure to stop by the Installing the Web Server role with PowerShell recipe in order to put that component into place. Let's get familiar with some of the common tasks in IIS.