Setup Internet Information Services (IIS) Web Server In Azure

Azure has been widely used these days as an "Infrastructure as a Service" (IaaS). We can spin up Virtual Machine in minutes and configure Prod/Dev environments with the resources required. In this article, we will see how to set up an IIS Web Server in Azure. IIS web servers are computers with specific software applications which help them accept the requests from other clients and return responses, or serve page requests. Thus IIS in turn facilitates information sharing over the Internet or through the intranet.

As a prerequisite, ensure that you have a registered Azure Subscription. In case you don’t have one already, you can check out this article here which describes the process to make use of Developer benefit program that credits $25 every month to our Azure account. So once we have a subscription in place, Log in to the Azure Subscription and add a new Virtual Machine. Once the VM has been in place we will add the IIS role to the VM and promote it to the role of an IIS Server.



Select the VM image which will serve as the basic template for the virtual machine. Here we are creating a Windows Server 2012 Virtual machine.



Specify the Virtual machine name and the required resources that will power the VM. Here I am selecting D2 resource which offers Dual Core processor and 7 GB RAM. Specify the credentials which will act as the administrator for the VM.



Specify the subscription and region/Virtual Network. If we are creating a multi-server farm within a network, ensure that a virtual network is created beforehand and it is specified in the virtual machine configuration page.



Check ‘Install the agent’ and click on the tick mark. This will start provisioning the VM.



Once the VM is created, login to the Virtual machine that was recently created. The Server manager will be opened by default during the start up.



Click on Add roles and features. This will open up the ‘Add Roles and Features wizard’.



Click on Next.



Select the radio button “Role-based or feature-based installation”.



Select the current server from the listed servers.



Select “Web server (IIS)” check box from the list of Roles. This will install the IIS role in the Server. If you need to add any other roles like Active Directory Domain Controller select them as well from the list. Click on Next.



The roles that will be installed in the server are listed out in the page. Check "Restart the destination server automatically if required" and click on Install.



The selected roles and features will be installed in the Virtual Machine server.



Installation has completed. Now, let’s go ahead and see if the IIS Server has been set up. Select Internet Information Services.



This will open up the Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager.



Browsing to the local host site will open up the default IIS Page.



Summary - Thus, we saw how to configure Internet Information Services web server in Azure Virtual Machine.