Assessing your Windows Server 2003 IIS Infrastructure

If your organization makes use of IIS on Windows Server 2003, you’ll need to assess your IIS infrastructure prior to beginning the migration to Windows Server 2012 R2.

When IT Pros initially think about IIS, they think “web servers, like the intranet server”. The reality is that IIS is a element in many other products that you likely have deployed. Servers that don’t initially look like web servers, but which run products built on IIS. WSUS is one example, Exchange is another, SQL Server Reporting Services – which many other products utilize, is a third. Chances are that a large number of servers in your organization are running IIS, even if they aren’t marked down in your asset registry as web servers.

The trick is finding them. In the best of all worlds you’ll have everything documented and you’ll know exactly which servers are running IIS and which ones are not. The reality might not be so clear cut. If you’re using a configuration management tool like Configuration Manager, you’ll be able to see which servers have the IIS role installed even if those servers aren’t listed as running IIS in your asset registry.

Once you understand which servers are running IIS, you can begin the process of migrating those workloads away from Windows Server 2003.