14 DAY TRIAL // Customers running Internet Information Services 7 and leveraging Application Request Routing can now upgrade to a new version of the proxy based routing module.
Microsoft released Application Request Routing Version 2.5 for IIS 7, both in 32-bit and 64-bit flavors, making it available through the Web Platform Installer (WebPI).
According to the software giant’s Won Yoo, ARR 2.5 for IIS 7 is capable of delivering a boost in performance to ARR. At the same time, in addition to the speed increase, customers will also be able to take advantage of enhanced scalability capabilities for ARR around disk caching scenarios.
Optimization word was done to kick up a notch memory usage and disk caching, but also to resolve issues related to Application Request Routing server throughput decrease following the switching on of the disk cache feature.
With ARRv2.5, Microsoft’s focus was on taking performance and scalability to the next level and delivering latency improvements. However, there is also a functional evolution between ARRv2.1 and ARRv2.5.
“One functional change that is worth mentioning is the ability to set the client affinity cookie on the main domain name. This particularly interesting if the site has multiple sub-domains, such as images.contoso.com, members.contoso.com and so on” Yoo stated.
“On such sites, in order to maintain client affinity across sub-domains, the client affinity can be set on the main domain, .contoso.com.”
Customers running ARR 1 and ARR 2 will be able to upgrade directly to the latest release. The same is not the case for early adopters testing pre-release versions of ARR 2.5 for IIS 7, which will need to remove both ARR and URL Rewrite before deploying v2.5.
Of course, one major change in terms of ARR is the way it’s served to users. It’s no longer available as a stand-alone solution, simply because with the advent of the WebPI, Microsoft no longer packs all dependent IIS Extensions into the bootstapper that shipped with ARR.
Yoo explained that “ARR" is more than just one IIS Extension:
•It is built on top of Web Farm Framework.
•It uses URL rewrite to manage routing rules.
•It uses External Cache to share ARR states when there are multiple ARR servers (only needed if hostname affinity feature is used.)”