Question:

In preparation to installing Virtual Server, and acknowledging the fact that it needs IIS, I would like to know:

  1. Is there any specific setup to perform on the IIS before I configure VS? Or, will it just need to be there?

    Also, since now I have web server software installed, I would like to configure it to make use of CGI (Perl!) and I am studying a description to do that right now - it mentions creating a directory where I can store the scripts AND a virtual directory under the IIS that points to this directory - now, this substitution of one directory for another was something that you could do in DOS, as I recall, so:
  2. Is this 'virtual directory' stuff something that is specific to IIS? Because the Windows filesystem wouldn't understand such a 'critter'.

TIA

Answer:

  1. You just need to make sure IIS is installed prior to install Virtual Server 2005 R2. This allows you to install the Admin Website component of Virtual Server, whose setup takes care of everything else
  2. "Virtual Directory" stuff is specific to IIS.

IIS stores the Virtual-to-FileSystem mapping inside of its configuration file, and whenever it receives a HTTP request for a URL in the Virtual namespace, IIS translates it to a resource in the FileSystem namespace using its configuration.

At this point, you can have any other mapping in effect in the FileSystem namespace (for example, NTFS junction points) to do further name mapping, but we are getting a bit more complicated now...

FYI: Virtual Server does not need IIS to administer/function. I use Virtual Server all the time without IIS. See this blog entry:
http://blogs.msdn.com/david.wang/archive/2005/06/21/Virtual_Server_2005_Administration_on_IIS.aspx

//David