Many websites use a multi-tiered infrastructure to promote content between development and production environments. One of the simplest is a three-tier development, staging, and production configuration. In this scenario the website and code is developed on a development instance. Once the code is ready, it is promoted to staging, where it is tested and confirmed to be working properly. Finally, it is promoted to production for general use.
In this recipe we will set up a basic three-tier website scheme on a single website in an NLB configuration. The same process can be performed for a non-NLB website by only providing one computer name to the scripts.
This recipe assumes an NLB web server configuration as shown in the Configuring NLB across multiple servers recipe in this chapter.