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Is there a way to upgrade tomcat servers...

  • without causing too much down time?
  • automatically copying(or configuring) all the existing configurations and webapps.

ex: tools like hudson can be upgraded automatically without even reaching out to the hudson folders on the server. May be it is not possible for tomcat since its a server rather than an application but is there something better than doing things manually.

sandeepkunkunuru
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1 Answers1

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In production environments, you need two webservers for high availability, plus some type of load balancer in front of them (commercial: Netscaler, BigIP / Free: HAProxy, nginx). You take one of the two servers out of the load balancer. Update it. Test it independently. Bring it back into the balancer. Remove the second one. Repeat.

This applies not only to Java servlet containers, but other types of web servers such as Apache HTTPD or IIS.

When dealing with multiple servers, be sure to configure some type of session affinity in the load balancer so that requests containing cookies always go to the same servers (so the user gets the same session) or the servers themselves need to be setup in a cluster where they can share sessions and cache with each other.

djsumdog
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