What is the best approach for deploying an ASP.Net Website to a web farm

We need to deploy our asp.net web site in web farm which consists of 16 web servers. Whenever we need to roll out a new release it is very time consuming and tedious as we need to deploy it first on the DR environment (16 web servers) and then on to Live environment (16 w开发者_运维问答eb servers).

Currently we prepare the msi on our build server and copy it on all the front end web servers which involves first FTPing the msi to a common location on hosting network and then copying from the common location to each server. After thet we backup the existing website and then run the installer one by one on each machine.

After installing the new version we replace the web.config file with the older one as it is encrypted and hardly contains any new thing in it as part of new release. This saves us from encrypting the web.config file again.

Could somebody please suggest a better way of doing this deployement as it is really turning out to be time consuming. Previously this model was ok for us as we had only 4 web servers but not it is no longer a sutable option.

Thanks..

Take a look at the Web Farm Framework. It will handle the replication of your application across your entire farm.

Another option is to use the "Shared Configuration" option in IIS7 as well as a DFS share to replicate all of your files and metabase configuration. This just won't handle registry changes or the GAC.