Extend SharePoint 2010 Web Application Http to Https

So a client of mine wants to use https on production and they have been running http until now. So this production environment has lots of data on it and they don’t want to lose that. Now different information is flowing around that you lose data when you migrate from http to https. Now I was asked to get this move done and of course my due-dilligence requires me to do this once on my demo machine before I dive into the quirks of the company.

Now I thought about three possible ways of doing this:
1) Create IIS AppPool and Site with SSL and unextend the web application in Central Admin and extend it with the newly created IIS Site.
2) Just extend the web application and set require SSL connection in the IIS Site.
3) Add another binding in IIS and add alternative access mapping in CA.

So I read somewhere that 2 and 3 are pretty much the same, MS does recommend the extension of the web app though. I am never sure what happens under the hood, but what I can say is I tried 2 and 3 and both do not cause loss of data. Now possibly the web config is altered (set back to default) or I have to redeploy the solutions, but in the end that’s nothing compared to the cost of losing business data.

Now there is the discussion of how to do this, because there are a few things to keep in mind:
1) IP-Ranges are not IP-Universes (ranges are finite!)
2) Get your certificates in place and hopefully it’s not just a server certificate in an enterprise environment (loadbalancing, anyone?)
3) Don’t forget your DNS-Routing!

So for my client I will try to get the dns routing corrected, the certificates in place and then extend the web-application.

Here some useful screenshots:

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