About Multiple Server Instances - MACROMEDIA COLFUSION MX 7 - CONFIGURING AND ADMINISTERING COLDFUSION MX Manual

About multiple server instances

The ColdFusion MX Administrator lets you create server instances and clusters. Additionally, you
can connect to remote JRun servers and add them to clusters.
Running multiple instances of ColdFusion MX has the following advantages:
Application isolation
server instance has separate settings and, because each server instance runs in its own Java Virtual
Machine (JVM), problems encountered by one application have no effect on other applications.
Clustering (load balancing and failover)
instance and add the instances to a cluster. The web server connector optimizes performance and
stability by automatically balancing load and by switching requests to another server instance
when a server instance stops running.
This chapter describes features that are available only if you have installed the multiserver
configuration. The multiserver configuration is a specialized J2EE configuration that installs
JRun and deploys ColdFusion MX as an expanded Enterprise Application Archive (EAR) in the
cfusion JRun server. The cfusion server is the only server that can create servers and clusters. The
JRun instance creation and clustering options in the ColdFusion MX Administrator are not
available in the server configuration, nor are they available in the J2EE configuration, even if you
deploy on JRun.
Note: You can also manually deploy ColdFusion MX on multiple server instances, using your J2EE
application server's server creation and deployment facilities, as documented in the ColdFusion
MX 6.1 documentation.
Expanded archive considerations
ColdFusion MX must run from an expanded directory structure. The Instance Manager expands
the EAR or WAR file automatically and then deploys the expanded directory structure into the
new server instance.
For more information on deploying ColdFusion MX in the J2EE configuration, see Installing and
Using ColdFusion MX.
File location considerations
ColdFusion MX lets you store CFM pages either under the external web server root or under the
ColdFusion web application root. The discussions in this chapter assume that you store your
CFM pages under the ColdFusion web application root and that you specify a context root for
your application. This is different from ColdFusion MX 6.1 documentation, which assumed that
you stored CFM pages under the web server root.
If you use the web server connector to access pages under the ColdFusion web application root
and your ColdFusion web application has an empty context root (this is the default), the
connector does not automatically serve static content, such as HTML pages and image files. If
this is the case, you must define web server mappings so that it can serve files from the
ColdFusion web application root.
For more information on serving CFM pages from the web server root, see
Server Management."
92 Chapter 7: Using Multiple Server Instances
You deploy an independent application to each server instance. Each
You deploy the same application to each server
Chapter 4, "Web