Lots of ideas, and lots of questions. The problem could be in your code or configuration (less likely with CF itself):
- a 500 error may be because somethiing in your code is failing. It could be something that "worked before cf2021" but is failing now due to an issue related to configuration of CF2021 that was not done correctly compared to however it was setup on your earlier CF version
- look in the coldfusion logs folder, at the application.log file. When you get the error on screen, do you see any error at the bottom of that log? What is it? Perhaps that will connect the dots readily for you (perhaps a needed mapping was not added to the CF 2021 Admin, etc.)
- or it could POSSIBLY be some compatibility issue with something that did run before but does not. What version of CF were you running before? And was that on the same machine as 2021 or on another machine?
- when trying to access the failing "virtual site", is that through an external web server, like IIS or Apache?
- and what OS are you running? Windows? Mac? Linux?
- did you install CF2021 with the full installer or the new zip install process?
- if the latter, and if using Windows, did you install the MS visual c++ 2012 redisrtibutable? The full installer does that for you, while the zip install does not (the docs tell you that you must, in order to connect CF to IIS or Apache, in order to then run the wsconfig tool)
- if you ran the wsconfig tool, I assume there were no errors?
Let's leave it at this for now, to hear what you may report. Or someone else may have different thoughts for you.
/Charlie (troubleshooter, carehart.org)