Let me preface this by saying I am a complete newb to IIS.. I am taking a formal class in a couple of weeks, and I have been running through all the documentation on iis.net and other bing searches I can find. I guess I just want to run something by the group and see if it actually makes any sense at all...
In our organization we have probably 40-50 stand alone IIS servers that each hosts its own application, are typically not heavily hit (4-5 users per application) and was typically administered by either someone in our app engineering area with heavy reliance on vendor support .. Obviously this is kind of a maintenance night mare when it comes to patching and chasing down any of 15 "mini iis admins" Our group has been tasked with centrally managing this and placing the "admin" in the hands of a couple.
Our thought is to build out a web farm (still evaluating specs) but lets say 3-4 web servers using shared configuration and a file server for shared content (is it better to use dfs??) and 2 ARR servers load balanced with NLB (or a hardware load balancer which I have to talk to my networking guys about as I don't know what type it is) Again I apologize for the newbness but I should be able to using hostheaders and cnames right?
I have also started reading about the web farm controller.. Is my understanding correct that this would be used if you didn't want to have the content on a central share?
Am I approaching this the right way? In your experience with vendors, (obviously they are all different) do they play well in web farm environments or do they start doing funky things within IIS?