An instance of Microsoft IIS Server 6 or 7/7.5 installed on each server.
Both servers have the same IIS services installed‑WWW, SMTP, and so on.
Both servers have identical web service extensions installed.
Full paths containing site files are identical on both servers.
The standby server holds a clean installation of IIS only with the default sites.
Sites on the Master server do not use URL redirection or UNC path redirection.
(In the Active Directory environment) Both Master and Replica servers should reside in the same Active Directory forest and be members of the same domain or trusted domains.
If anonymous access is enabled and used, configure the following:
To keep permissions synchronized between the two servers, both IIS processes should use the same user account for anonymous user access. Create a new domain user account and configure both IIS servers to use it. For more information about how you can do this, see the Microsoft documentation.
Although it is not specified in the Microsoft documentation, you must edit the local (or domain) group policy to allow the user account the following privileges: Allow log on locally, Allow log on as a batch job, and Access this computer from the network. Also, make sure to duplicate any permissions changes made to the file system for the original anonymous user account to the newly assigned domain account as well.
If you are using SSL encryption, see the Microsoft documentation for information about copying the proper certificate.
If you are using IIS 7.0/7.5, you must have IIS 6.0 Management Compatibility installed. Since the IIS 6.0 Management Compatibility is disabled by default when installing IIS 7.0/7.5, you must enable this option while installing IIS 7.0/7.5. For more information, see Installing IIS 6.0 Management Compatibility for IIS.
