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Frank S. DeRienzo, MBA
Enablement Services Engineer
Brandon Purcell
Table of Contents
Integrating Microsoft Network Load Balancing with ColdFusion MX 6.1
Although hardware solutions have steadily replaced software solutions for server load balancing and failover, a significant viable niche continues to use software solutions. The increased robustness of hardware solutions, along with their declining price has encouraged web masters and IT professionals to transition from less-scalable but more affordable and more easily implemented software-based solutions to hardware-based options. The niche for software solutions is sites with two to four web servers; in other words, sites sustaining moderate traffic that must always be available. Indeed, the need for availability, scalability, application sensitivity, content-awareness, and so forth, quickly forces a sometimes painful transition from a single-server platform to a server cluster or a server farm. In the two-to-four server niche, the preferred software solution for load balancing on web servers running Macromedia ColdFusion and/or Macromedia JRun has been ClusterCATS. Now Microsoft 2003 Server bundles Network Load Balancing (NLB) with web servers too. Previously, Microsoft only offered NLB with its high-end operating systems, Advanced and DataCenter. NLB gives web masters and IT professionals an economical software solution for load-balancing and failover for ColdFusion websites running on Windows 2003. By combining ColdFusion/JRun clustering with NLB, you will have a dual-cluster solution. On the first set of network interface cards (NICs), you can have a shared IP address for the web server, on the second set of NICs you can host a ColdFusion/JRun application cluster.
The article describes how to configure NLB to work with ColdFusion MX 6.1 JRun clustering, where the ColdFusion applications are co-located with the web servers. Or to put it another way, co-located is when you host Internet Information Server (IIS) 6 and ColdFusion with NLB on the same server; you must use the following procedure in this case. This article has two sections:
- How to configure NLB to work with a ColdFusion cluster
- How to configure the ColdFusion cluster to work with NLB
Requirements
To complete this tutorial you will need to install the following software and files:
ColdFusion
Windows 2003 Server
About the authors
Before joining BrightTiger/Allaire/Macromedia/Adobe in June 1997, Frank S. DeRienzo had a distinguished military career with the U.S. Army Rangers and Special Forces. He is a graduate of Gordon College and holds an MBA from the University of Massachusetts. During his tenure with Adobe (Macromedia), he has focused on high availability and scalability through website clustering and web server integration with various hardware load-balancing and content-management platforms. Currently he is part of the Adobe Enablement Services team, where his primary focus is on Breeze Server implementation and training.
Brandon Purcell started at Macromedia/Allaire four years ago as a support engineer working with ColdFusion and JRun. He has worked with the Professional Services Group helping customers with their architecture planning, code reviews, customized training, load testing, and performance tuning. He has also worked on special projects including the clustering, load testing and deployment of the new macromedia.com website. During his tenure with Macromedia, he has supported ColdFusion, JRun, Flash Remoting, and has written white papers and articles on clustering and high availability with ColdFusion and JRun. Currently he is working as an escalation engineer for the Flex Server Support Organization. You can visit him at his website.
