IIS Web Server : Part I – Installation

What is web server

Web servers is program that enable a computer to present web pages on the Internet or locally

All websites need to be hosted on a server from where people access them

A web server is a system that handles requests through HTTP protocol [port 80] or HTTPS [port 443 ], you request a file from the server and it responds with the requested file,

The primary function of a web server is to store, process and deliver web pages to clients

What is IIS ?

IIS is stand for [internet information services] is a web server from Microsoft which you can install in your Windows operating system to host websites.

Once you IIS service : then your windows become web server to host one site or many sites either locally [in your Network Only ] or even published to internet

other web server

As we mentioned above that IIS is Microsoft web server , but about other web servers ?

Below are the latest statistics of the market share of all sites of the top web servers on the Internet by W3Techs Usage of Web Servers for Websites .

Web server	Vendor	Popularity up to Feb 219
Apache	Apache	44.3%
nginx	NGINX, Inc	41.0%
IIS	Microsoft	8.9%
LiteSpeed WS	LiteSpeed Technologies	3.9%
GWS	Google	0.9%
All other web servers		less than 1%

How web server work

let us to have a look to network diagram above

as you see : We have windows server 2016 with IIS services installed then configure 3 web site in that web server as the following

Sales web site
HR web site
IT help desk web site

Now for sales department team to follow their business work :

they use web site httP://web108/sales
Client Computer send request to DNS server asking for IP address of web108
DNS server reply with IP address 172.16.100.108
Client computer send request called http request asking for home page of local website called [sales ]
Web108 reply with home page of local web site called [sales ]

Also for HR department team to follow their business work : they use web site httP://web108/HR

Same thing for IT department team to follow their business work : they use web site httP://web108/HelpDesk

so one web server [web108.pioneers.lab] could host many web site in deferent directories

these web server will serve local users [in LAN ] à but we can publish it to internet to serve internet request , which we will explain later

now let to install IIS server and create websites inside

prepare you server

preparing server involved with the following :

the first step is to install windows 216 servers with desktop experience [standard of datacenter ]

Mostly you are working with virtual machine [Hyper-V or VMWARE or Virtual box] and you copied VM : so you have to use sysprep to create unique security identifier SID , this will avoid SID conflict when join to active directory

then we assign IIP address

and rename server

and finally Join to AD Pioneers.lab

please use left and right arrows to move between slides

install IIS server

Now server is ready to install IIS

Make sure Web108 has DVD windows 216 server : this step to accelerate process so windows will copy IIS file from Win216 DVD NOT from Microsoft website

In my case : Win216 DVD is D:\ Drive and installation files in D:\sources\sxs

Open server manager from start menu or run [servermanager.exe ]

Select : manage à Add Role and feature à