Overview
The Internet Information Services 6.0 Migration Tool is a command line tool that automates several of the steps needed to move a Web application from IIS 4.0, IIS 5.0 or IIS 6.0 to a clean installation of Internet Information Services (IIS) 6.0 and Windows Server 2003.
The tool transfers configuration data, Web site content, and application settings to a new IIS 6.0 server if desired, or can move just application settings using the copy functionality.
Migrating applications to IIS 6.0 enables organizations to take advantage of the new fault-tolerant architecture available in IIS 6.0 and other features that increase Web server reliability, performance, and security. Update:
Features
Beyond all the features included in 1.0 of the IIS Migration Tool, the following updated version fixed these problems:
IIS cannot spawn new worker processes during a migration
The cause of this problem because migrations that are performed to a live production IIS6 server, existing sites may not serve properly until the migration completes. This behavior was because the migration tool locks the metabase during the migration. In the new version the the migration tool does not lock the metabase and hence existing sites on the destination server will continue to serve during the migration.
Permissions of the AdminACL for the W3SVC/<siteID> in the IIS 6.0 metabase are incorrect after migration
This occurred because the migration tool did not migrate the AdminACL correctly for the W3SVC/<siteID>. This resulted in web applications not functioning on the target IIS 6 server. Users may get "500 Internal Server Error" when browsing the migrated ASP web application or "Server Application is Unavailable" when browsing the migrated ASP.NET application.
Migration Tool does not migrate nested applications correctly.
This happended because a bug in v1.0 of the migration tool. In 1.0, it did not migrate nested application(s) properly. The AppRoot metabase key is migrated as (/LM/W3SVC/<ID of site on source>/Root/....) instead of (/LM/W3SVC/<ID of site on Target>/Root/....) which resulted to web application not bering served. Users may get "500 Internal Server Error" when browsing the migrated ASP web application or "Server Application is Unavailable" when browsing the migrated ASP.NET application.
Benefits
The migration tool offers a single, do-it-all utility that aims at helping customers upgrade or migrate Web applications and has the following benefits:
- Simple, easy-to-use, functionality to migrate one website from previous versions of IIS to IIS 6.0
- Allows customizations prior to migrating to new server such as changing IP Address, port, or host header
Requirements
All versions of the migration tool have the following limitations:
- If you are migrating from NT4 with FPSE 98, and you choose to migrate with /fpse switch, it is possible that the Server Extensions will not function properly on IIS6 as they were on IIS4. The only recommended workaround is to upgrade to FPSE 2000 or FPSE 2002 on the source server (NT4) before beginning the migration.
- The migration can be performed for only one individual site at a time, if you want to migrate the entire IIS server. You may want to put all the migration commands in a batch or script file.
- Files that are located in a directory structure that exceeds MAX_PATH are not migrated. The migration tool will error out with "Access Denied" and stops the migration.
- If you migrate the same site twice and the administrators group does not have full control permission on the source content, the migration tool will error out the second time with an "Access Denied" error. To workaround this, you can either give the administratorsgroup full control on the source content or delete the content on the destination server before you run the migration the second time.