New stuff in IIS 8, Windows 8

Windows 8 comes With IIS 8, so far I’ve found some “juicy” New features 🙂
First of the MMC looks like the old IIS7 (thank god Microsoft hasn’t implemented a Silverlight Console for this feature)

ill just walk quick trough som New features in IIS.
First of when you open the IIS console you have now a New option on the right side menu called “Get New web platform componentes” This will redirect you to a website where you can download Microsoft Web platform installer.
NB: If you want to test this you have to have .Net 3.5 installed first ( you can install this via Server Manager )

As you can see this Application makes it easy for a webmaster to install the Tools he/her needs, and you can also install any CMS solution that is avaliable. (This isn’t a New feature in IIS8 but for the sake of the demo I thought Id just take a quick walktrough.) And If I choose WordPress as my CMS and mark it for install, the Application Automatic find what other Components I need for my installation.

But enough of the web platform installer, lets go back to IIS.
IIS 7 introduced support for CPU Throttling at an Application Pool level. You could specify a limit of CPU usage and a corresponding action to take when that limit was exceeded. The two available options were NoAction or KillW3wp. The names accurately reflect what each option does: Doing nothing in the case of NoAction, or killing the worker process for KillW3wp.
In IIS8 you have two more options “Throttle” and “Throttleunderload”

The Throttle option will always restrict the application to the specified amount of CPU utilization, while the ThrottleUnderLoad option will allow the process to use more than the specified amount of CPU, provided that there is no contention for CPU resources. So when a webapplication goes berserk It doesn’t have to kill the w3 process.

And lets not forget Centralized SSL Certificates Management.
Here is what Microsoft says about it.

On Windows Server 8, the Centralized SSL Certificate Support feature allows the server administrators to store and access the certificates centrally on a file share. Similar to Shared Configuration feature introduced in Windows Server 2008, the Windows Servers in a server farm can be configured to load the certificates from the file share on-demand.

With this feature, the management experience of SSL bindings is much simplified. When it comes to SSL, the DNS name and CN name of the certificate must match. Similar contract can be further extended to the file names of the certificates. For example, www.contoso.com would use the certificate with a file name www.contoso.com.pfx. This contract enables Windows Server 8 to have just one SSL binding, regardless of the number of secure sites that are using this feature. The corresponding certificate is inferred by the SNI value or hostname of the requested web site, and by matching it to the file name of the certificate.

This feature is not default installed by IIS, it is an optional feature.

Configure the Centralized SSL Certificate Support feature:

Open IIS Manager.
Select server node in the left navigation window:
Under Management, double-click on Centralized Certificates:
In the Actions pane, select Edit Feature Settings:
Enter the following information:
- Enable Centralized Certificates: Selected
- Physical path: For example: \localhosttemp
  - This is UNC path to the file share where the certificates are located.
- User name: Specify a user account that has read access to the file share.
- Password/Confirm password.
- Certificate Private Key Password:
  - This is optional. If the certificates do not have password, leave this empty.
  - If the certificates have one global password, enter that password here.