Hardware load balancer in front of 2 cf9 enterprise servers

Hi petron,

depends on your needs, if you want to load balance across your two (or more server), you should have at least one instance on each physical server installed and configured.

You can choose to cluster them or not, should be better to cluster them togheter, anyway it's not a must if you know the drawbacks, and depends on your applications

You can have each instance configured in the same way and not in cluster, and your load balancer can balance the load between each instance with the algorythm you prefer (configure the load balance with sticky session, or your users sometimes can loose their session), take care that in this way when one of your server will hangs, the users managed by that server will loose their session anyway, and will be managed by another cf instance.

With cluster and session replication you avoid this problem, each sessions are shared between all of your cf instance, and in case one of them have a problem, your users will be managed by another instance without knowing that they are managed by a different cf instance

Here some useful articles:

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/coldfusion/articles/clustering_cf8.html

http://livedocs.adobe.com/coldfusion/8/htmldocs/help.html?content=clustering_6.html

http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/pdfs/cf8_multiple_instances_wp.pdf

hope this helps

Bye

Claudio

Sorry forgot to include spec:

Hardware load balancer: Cisco ACE 4710 VLB

Servers: Win 2008

Coldfusion 9

IIS 7.5