Ideal railo + tomcat vhost setup for busy production server

Question

I'm migrating a lot of websites from Resin 3 to Tomcat 7 (centos 4/apache 2.20) and I'm struggling to determine what type of configuration matches my requirements. In particular:

• proxy_ajp vs mod_jk vs mod_proxy for passing requests to Tomcat/Railo
• automating deployment of new sites
• putting WEB-INF outside the site roots (to simplify cloning sites)
• using apache itk with tomcat so each vhost runs as a different user and process
• having a single shared railo server administrator config
• support for SES URLs with no extension (ie: /path/to/page)
• SSL support required

I've read a lot of howtos already but most are out of date or provide conflicting advice. I would like to see some examples from people who run many railo vhosts and deploy them automatically or programmatically. In general I'd prefer efficiency/speed over simplicity as I want to get the most out of limited resources.

I could have asked these questions separately but I want to be sure any answers take into account all the above factors (assuming the requirements are actually compatible).

Answer 1

firstly, check out the vivotech installers - they are a hosting company, so use their installers as your base, they are flawless. (it uses tomcat)

railo 3.3 makes it a lot easier to deploy contexts from admin, so scripting this shouldn't be that hard.

• web-inf should be automatically put into a site when it is defined in tomcat
• if you give each user a new context-root, then they will have their own admin
• every webserver (apache/iis2k8/even tomcat) supports url-rewrite

• everything supports ssl

• you might also want to look at how you're going to tune your jvm's for this senario, then do some load testing to see how they fare.

• drop an email to sean corfield, google railo and his name and you'll get his email.