CF8.01 Cluster creation issues

Thank you!
This does clear it up for me. So I think the best direction for our site is to use NLB.

Thank you again
Neil Chakrabarty

WV_DEP_GUY wrote:
> That is Cold Fusion 8 cannot do load balancing and failover without a third party product. Is this correct?

I think it can, on the same machine. I.E. I know you can have multiple
instances of ColdFusion installed on the same machine. I have read that
this *can* be used for fail over and|or load balancing. Personally, I
have only used it for application isolation.

But I think when you start talking multiple physical servers, then you
are looking outside of ColdFusion for your load balancing|fail over tools.

Just be aware that there maybe more options here, depending on what you
want to do. It is often not thought that a ColdFusion server can be
separated from and configured to connect to one or more remote web
server boxes. You can separate the web server layer from the
application server layer. Then you can load balance|fail over these
layers independently of each other as needed or desired.

Hmnn, so I think either NLB or a Cluster Device is required. That is Cold Fusion 8 cannot do load balancing and failover without a third party product. Is this correct?

NLB is great if you've got just a small site or two with a smaller load requirement. But as Neo says, you'll want to look into a hardware based load balancer.

I personally detest Cisco's load balancers. In my 8 years of experience with the things, I think they're junk. But they'll run forever.

F5 is good, but over priced. You could check into Radware or Zeus as alternatives.

If you've spooled up a clustered CF environment, you shouldn't need that old ColdFusion instance all the time. You could set it up so that you start it when you need it (like the JRun admin).

Finally, it is a snap to have each instance using a different config file. You can start the server on the command line with the -config switch, or create a service with:

../jrun4/bin/jrunsvc –install cfusion1 “JRun Cfusion1 Server” – config jvm.config_cfusion1

Yeah, I noticed that. It's kind of annoying having the cfusion instance taking up 128MB unnecessarily, but I don't know if I feel ambitious enough to try tweaking it.

Unfortunately it is difficult to configure a different heap size for each instance. When you change the heap size for one of the instances, it affects ALL instances. This is because this heap size is configured in jvm.config (JRun4\bin) which is shared by all instances.

If you're willing to jump through a few flaming hoops, you can work around this limitation. This article has some excellent notes on how to approach it:
http://mkruger.cfwebtools.com/index.cfm/2006/4/17/multiserver

After trying a few things, I think I've got it. I created a new site in IIS with a new document root, and then attached the cluster to this site. I'm guessing that updating templates in the new docroot will effectively update both instances in the cluster, so the only time I need to update the instances is if I need to change settings in CF Administrator (e.g. adding datasources).

So, I've now got 4 instances of jrun: 1 running the cfusion instance, 2 running the clustered instances, and 1 running the admin instance. Can I safely decrease the heap site of the cfusion instance without affecting overall performance?

It sounds like you need some direction and understanding of how clustering works. These topics may be a good place for you to start:

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/webforums/forum/messageview.cfm?forumid=1&catid=7&threadid=1329039
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/webforums/forum/messageview.cfm?forumid=1&catid=143&threadid=1294296

Best of luck.