Migrate IIS from one server to another

Last week I had the unfortunate and immediate need to migrate IIS 6.0 from one Windows Server 2003 to another. I thought this process was going to be very painful, when in fact it was quite simple and straightforward. It’s hard to believe that after all these years I’ve never had to do this. There really is a first time for everything!

Luckily I run everything within VMware ESX Environment, so no data needed to be copied from one machine to another. I simply provisioned a new Windows Server 2003 guest and added the old server’s VMDK disk to the new machine.

• The first thing you need to do is backup your old IIS configuration. In IIS Manager, right click in IIS Manager > All Tasks > Backup/Restore Configuration.

• Probably the most imporant part of the whole process is to make sure you “Encrypt the backup using password”. This makes th e IIS config “portable”. If you don’t encrypt it, you won’t be able to import it on a different system as there are sessions keys stored withing the IIS metabase.

• By default the configuration backup goes to C:\WINDOWS\system32\inetsrv\MetaBack. So you will need to grab both files it has created and move them on over to the new server. Place them in the same location on the new server because IIS doesn’t give you a choice to browse for a backup – it looks in that directory each time.

• Now you’ll restore that configuration from within IIS Manager, right click in IIS Manager > All Tasks > Backup/Restore Configuration. Choose the one you want to restore and restore. It will ask for the encryptin password.
• Now we need to restart IIS. This will actually re-create the IUSR account in the Local User Manager, which kind of impressed me. The password will be wrong for this account so you need to set it to something manually by the normal Reset Password function.
• Now you need to need to tell the metabase about that new password. Microsoft has a nice article outlining how this is done.
  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/297989
• Restart IIS and for the most part you should be good to go.

I opted to simply reset the password for the IUSR account that the metabase created automatically for me. The name was wrong (hence IUSR_computer), however this meant I wouldnt need to change all of the special IUSR permissions set for special files such as MDB and other special case files. You can easily tell the metabase to use a new user account as the IUSR account using the metabase explorer, but I’m not going to go into that right now.