Before Macromedia ColdFusion 4.0, ColdFusion had no built-in High Availability (HA) features. Administrators could use a hardware load-balancer to distribute requests to web servers, but this was an expensive option (ColdFusion 4.0 was released in 1996). We introduced ClusterCats with ColdFusion 4.0, which provided clustering and load-balancing out of the box for customers who bought Macromedia ColdFusion Enterprise. Then, with the introduction of ColdFusion MX, ColdFusion again had no built-in HA features—while the move to Java/J2EE in ColdFusion MX brought many benefits, it excluded ClusterCats.

One of the main benefits of moving to J2EE was that it gave ColdFusion the ability to take advantage of features provided by the underlying application server. Since ColdFusion is a certified J2EE application, it can run on any certified (any many non-certified) J2EE application server. The two most prominent application servers are BEA WebLogic and IBM WebSphere. Both of these provide robust HA features and multiple instance support, but add to your budget cost. Meanwhile, if you buy Macromedia ColdFusion Enterprise version, you have to get an application server too.

Most of you already know that Macromedia JRun, a popular and easy-to-use J2EE server, is the underlying application server for ColdFusion. JRun is a full-featured J2EE application server with clustering and multiple-instance support. However, if you’re not familiar with J2EE, the JRun Management Console (JMC) can seem daunting. Setting up a new application server and deploying ColdFusion to it requires some knowledge of J2EE concepts. And clustering inside JRun is entirely proprietary; it is yet another area of knowledge to master. Likewise, if you deploy to BEA WebLogic or IBM WebSphere, you must also become familiar with their administrative functions to deploy instances and manage HA features individually, as these are not part of the J2EE specification.

With ColdFusion MX 7, our goal was to make it easy for you to use multiple instances and to reintroduce HA features. Thus, we created the ColdFusion Enterprise Manager, a feature that is part of the ColdFusion Administrator. It’s available to users who have installed the Enterprise version of ColdFusion MX 7 and provides a user interface for configuring multiple servers and managing clusters.

Requirements

To complete this tutorial you will need to install the following software and files:

ColdFusion MX 7

• Try
• Buy

Note that ColdFusion MX 7 makes connector and application server clustering available to you, but it does not give you front-end web server clustering. If you have two web servers in front of your application server cluster, you must use a domain name server (DNS) or other hardware. This article explains how to use one web server with multiple ColdFusion instances.

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