Windows Loves drupal

Windows

Drupal
Alessandro Pilotti
@alexpilotti
MVP ASP.NET / IIS
Windows Azure Insider

MCSD, MCAD, MCSE, MCDBA, MCT
Red Hat Certified Engineer

Some Facts About the
Windows OS
 Based on Windows NT, released in July 1993

 Hardware independent OS

 POSIX subsystem

 Provides excellent command line tools
 PowerShell

 Excellent security model

 Server Core option for minimal GUI and footprint

Windows and IIS
Product Name OS Version IIS Release
Windows XP 5.1 5.1 08/01
Windows Server 2003 5.2 6.0 03/03
Windows Vista 6.0 (Build 6000) 7.0 01/07
Windows Server 2008 6.0 (Build 6001) 7.0 03/08

Windows 7 6.1 7.5 07/09
Windows Server 2008 6.1 7.5 07/09
R2
Windows 8 6.2 8.0 ?
Windows Server 2012 6.2 8.0 ?

IIS 6
 Kernel level component (http.sys) listens to HTTP requests
 HUGE performance improvement over IIS 5

 All user code runs in separate processes
 Worker Process (w3wp.exe)
 Crashes in worker processes don’t affect the stability of the service

 Web gardens
 Multiple WP per single web applications

 Configuration stored in a XML metabase
 MetaBase.Xml
 MBSchema.Xml

IIS 7.x / 8.0
 Complete redesign over IIS 6.0
 Modular design
 http.sys is still part of the architecture
 Improved remote administration and delegation
 Enhanced command line and scripting tools
 Including PowerShell cmdlets
 Flexible model not limited to HTTP
 Tight integration with WCF

Security
 Windows is a very secure OS!
 Running Internet Explorer as administrator and getting malware
does not mean that the system is flawed
 RunAs permits to execute processes as different users

 Windows Server 2008 introduced some unique security
features

 Windows Firewall
 Since Windows Server 2008:
 Address space layout randomization (ASLR)
 Network Access Protection (NAP)

Comparing PHP Stacks

 Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP
 Windows + Apache + MySQL + PHP
 Windows + IIS + MySQL + PHP
 Windows + IIS + MS SQL Server + PHP

Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP

 Pros
 Most known and deployed stack in OSS world
 Linux is a highly configurable operating system
 Most Linux distributions can easily be configured for Apache,
MySQL and PHP (yum / apt-get / etc)
 Apache is a highly modular and scalable web server
 Lots of documentation available
 Tightly integrated update process (yum / apt-get)
 Cons
 Lack of simple configuration tools
 Configuration requires a wide knowledge
 Deployment differences between distributions

Windows + Apache + MySQL + PHP

 Pros
 Most of the components are shared with the LAMP stack
 Suitable for solutions that require integration with both Apache
modules (e.g. mod_rewrite) and Windows
 Until FastCGI for IIS showed up, undoubtfully the best PHP
stack on Windows
 Tools like XAMPP provide an easy deployment option
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_WAMPs
 Cons
 Performance
 Limited documentation and examples
 Limited integration in the Windows ecosystem
 Heterogeneous scenario for security updates

Windows + IIS + MySQL + PHP

 Pros
 Performance (FastCGI and WinCache)
 Tightly integrated in the IIS 7.x ecosystem
 Easy to configure an deploy via WebPI
 Easy to manage via IIS Manager
 Easy to script via WebDeploy and Powershell

 Cons
 Web apps requiring integration with Apache modules
need to be reviewed

MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server
 Using PHP Data Objects PDO eases portability issues
 SQL Server is a choice to evaluate in scenarios that
require high availability

 PHP Drivers for SQL Server 3.0 just released!
 Drupal + SQL Server through Commerce Guys module

PHP on Windows
 COM integration
 Simplest way to access OS native 3rd party features
 Marshaling performance is not brilliant (IDispatch / late
binding)
 .NET integration (experimental)
 W32Api (experimental)
 Register / Invoke API functions
 Be careful with the parameters on the stack
 win32service
 start/stop/register/unregister services
 Note: flock() has a slightly different behavior on Windows

IIS 7 Modules
 Individual features used to process a request
 Executed in a pipeline
 Native
 OS specific binaries (e.g. written in C++)
 More performant
 Managed
 .NET assemblies, executed by the .NET CLR
 More secure and manageable

Windows Server 2012 - SNI
 Windows Server 2012 introduces some important
features
 Huge performance improvements for multi-tenant!

 Server Name Indication (SNI)
 Assign different X509 certificates to different host headers
 Requires IE >= 7.0, Chrome >= 6.0, FF >= 2.0,
SafariMobile >= 5.0
 Non supported in IE on Windows XP (even on IE 9)!

CPU Throttling
 CPU resource pooling is a problem in IIS 7.x
 Processes exceeding their quota get killed, not throttled
 Lots of errors in user applications
 Not suitable for multitenant scenarios
 This feature required specific kernel support

Windows Server 2012
CPU Throttling

WebPI
 Microsoft Web Platform Installer (WebPI) is a free tool
that simplifies deployment of web solutions
 IIS features and extensions
 WinCache, PHP Drivers for SQL Server, PHP Manager
 Frameworks
 PHP 5.2 / 5.3, .Net, etc
 Web applications
 Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress, DotNetNuke, Orchard, etc
 Database
 MS SQL Server Express, MySQL, etc
 WebMatrix
 WebMatrix 2 RC available!

Drupal via WebPI
 Fastest way to setup Drupal on IIS
 Takes care of all the steps
 Deploy of Drupal (6.x or 7.x)
 Dependencies
 PHP, IIS: CGI, URL Rewrite, VC9, WinCache, etc
 File permissions
 Database creation

Windows Cache Extension for
PHP
 Open source project developed by Microsoft
 IIS Specific accelerator
 Requires PHP 5.2 or 5.3 x86
 Non thread safe version
 Provides features not available in APC and
other accelerators
 Current version: 1.1

Drush 5.x
 A command line shell and scripting interface
 Written in PHP
 MS SQL Server is supported
 Windows setup available on
http://drush.ws/drush_windows_installer
 Takes care of all required dependencies
 Requires elevation

Drush aliases
 Create a file aliases.drushrc.php in %UserProfile%.drush

$aliases[’drupal7'] = array(

'root' => '/path/to/drupal',

'uri' => 'dev.mydrupalsite.com',

'os' => 'Windows',

'remote-user' => 'Administrator',

'winrs-password' => 'Passw0rd',

'remote-host' => 'DrupalWeb1'

);

Server Farm
 IIS extensions:
 Application request Routing (ARR)
 Web Farm Framework (WFF)

 You can enable independently
 Load balancing and caching
 Server farm provisioning
 Platform / applications

WebDeploy
 Web Application Packaging
 Application or site, including DBs
 Sources and destinations can be
 Live servers
 Zip files

 Deployment
 Administrative rights not required
 Integration with VMSVC for remote deployment

 IIS server synchronization
 Entire server / site / application
 Differential
 Detects missing dependencies

 http://www.microsoft.com/web/websitespark/

 Software
 Production licenses for self hosting: Windows Web Server 2008 R2; SQL Server 2008 Web
Edition and development tools

 Azure
 WebsiteSpark members get up to $1400* in annual Windows Azure resources

 Training
 Free online training and access to the MSDN developer community and resources

 Support
 2 professional support incidents

 Criteria
 An individual or a company with < than 10 employees engaged in website design &
development

 Check out also BizSpark for startups
 http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/

Resources
http://groups.drupal.org/drupal-windows

http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/PHP-at-Scale-on-the-Microsoft-Platform

Free Webcasts!
 Deploying Drupal on IIS with Web Platform Installer (WebPI)
 Deploying Drupal on IIS without Web Platform Installer (WebPI)
 Building a Drupal Web Farm with IIS and Application Request Routing (ARR) -
Part 1
 Building a Drupal Web Farm with IIS - Part 2
 IIS URL Rewrite for PHP and Drupal
 Web Deployment Tool (WebDeploy) for Drupal sites
 Optimizing Drupal and PHP sites on IIS, including Profile Guided Optimization
(PGO)
 Optimizing Drupal in IIS with Memcache and Solr
 Configuring and managing Drupal with SQL Server
 Managing Drupal on the Windows Platform with Drush

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