System information

CONFIGURING AND ADMINISTERING COLDFUSION 9

Using Multiple Server Instances

Last updated 2/21/2012

• (Optional, Windows only) Specify whether to create a Windows service for the server instance and whether to

define the Windows service with an auto restart recovery option.

6 Click Submit.

The ColdFusion Administrator creates a server instance with ColdFusion deployed in it and starts the server

instance. The ColdFusion application that it deploys is based on the application archive file specified in the Create

from EAR/WAR field or on the cfusion server instance (if you don’t specify an EAR or WAR file).

Creating a JRun server instance and deploying the ColdFusion application can take a few minutes.

7 Click Return to Instance Manager.

You can also start and stop the server instance using the JMC, the JRun Launcher, or the command line (jrun_root/bin

jrun start|stop --servername).

Enabling application isolation

You can create separate server instances, each with its own ColdFusion applications; each application then has its own

ColdFusion and J2EE server resources. In this configuration, you typically have a single external web server with

multiple server instances on one computer, and separate virtual hosts (or sites) for each server instance.

Note: Like ColdFusion, other J2EE application servers provide equivalent capabilities, and most of the concepts apply

when deploying the ColdFusion J2EE configuration on those J2EE servers.

Running independent applications this way has several advantages, including the following:

• Errors at the levels of the ColdFusion application or the JRun server do not affect any other ColdFusion

applications.

• You can support multihomed servers, where a single web server supports multiple IP addresses or domain names,

such as www.mycompany.com and services.anothercompany.com, each running from a separate web root. For

more information, see

“Multihoming” on page 67.

• Individual applications can use different JVM configurations, or even different JVM implementations. This feature

is useful if one application requires a large Java heap. To specify customized JVM options, start the JRun server

instance from the command line using the -

config option of the jrun command, which specifies a customized

jvm.config file. This feature is explained in the “Starting and stopping JRun servers” section in Installing and Using

ColdFusion.

Note: Installing and Using ColdFusion describes creating multiple server instances on a single computer. To create

multiple server instances on separate computers, each computer requires a separate license of ColdFusion Enterprise

Edition.

To achieve complete application isolation, you use web-server-specific functionality to create a separate website for

each application. Web servers have different terminology for this concept. For example, in IIS, you define separate

websites (available in Windows server editions only) and in Apache, you create multiple virtual hosts.

These instructions apply when running ColdFusion in the multiserver configuration. The principles apply when

running ColdFusion on other J2EE application servers. However, not all J2EE application servers integrate with

external web servers. For more information, see

“Multihoming” on page 67.

These instructions assume that you deploy each application at a named context root, which enables users to access

CFM pages by specifying http://hostname/context-root/pagename.cfm. If other web applications are running in the

server instance, each web application must use a different context root.