Configuring IIS Bindings to include host headers with https on Windows Server 2008 (for SharePoint)

author Rik Hepworth calendar May 27, 2009 · 2 min read · Uncategorised  ·
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NOTE: We use a wildcard SSL certificate which makes our life much easier when dealing with multiple hostnames. I have not tested this approach with multiple SSL certificates for specific sites.

We’ve been reconfiguring our SharePoint 2007 farm over the past couple of days and it’s now hosted on Windows Server 2008 and using NLB (network load balancing). The load balancer has been configured with a single public IP address and all our previous DNS CNAME registrations have been replaced with hostname A registrations pointing at the address. With our previous configuration we had multiple IP addresses on the server, one for each web application. Each IIS web site was then configured with a host header and ip address to allow for secure traffic over HTTPS.

With our new configuration, I didn’t want to specify an IP address on the web site. Handily, IIS 7 makes that scenario possible (and even relatively straightforward). The only snag is that you can’t configure the necessary bindings through the IIS Manager GUI. You can do it through an xml config file, however:

  1. Look in c:windowssystem32inetsrvconfig and edit the applicationHost.config file. Make sure you take a backup first!
  2. Find the <sites> section in the file. In there you will find a element for each IIS web site. Each of those has a <bindings> element with each port/protocol binding listed. Our main site looked like this:
    <bindings> <binding protocol=”https” bindingInformation=”*:443:” /> </bindings>
    and we changed it to look like this:
    <bindings> <binding protocol=”https” bindingInformation=”*:443:**myhost.mydomain.com**” /> </bindings>
  3. Repeat for each web application. If you have more than one web application on the same IP address using either http or https you need to configure a host header or you’ll have problems.
  4. Execute an iisreset.

We now have all our content web applications, the SSP and the central administration web sites all running on a single IP address, many on the same port and using SSL.

As I said at the start of this post, we use a wildcard certificate which makes my initial IIS configuration easier. I haven’t tried multiple certificates, and I’m interested to know if that works or not.