"Getting Started with Multiple Instances in CF", with Charlie Arehart

WHEN: Thurs. Jul 23, 12:00pm US EDT (UTC/GMT-4)
MEETING URL: http://experts.acrobat.com/cfmeetup/
DURATION: Approx. 1 hour
Meeting will be recorded. URL will be posted after meeting at http://recordings.coldfusionmeetup.com
What time is the meeting in your timezone? See http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?year=2009&month=07&day=23&hour=12&min=00&sec=0&p1=25 which shows the time as US EDT, and you can choose your city from the list offered to see what time that is in your own timezone.

ABOUT THIS SESSION:

Our noon (US EDT) talk on Thursday July 23 will be yours truly, Charlie Arehart, speaking on "Getting Started with Multiple Instances in CF".

TOPIC DESCRIPTION:

Have you wondered about using or trying out the "multiple instance" feature of CF (technically the "multiserver" installation option). Available in its current form since CF 7, many developers and shops still have not adopted it, perhaps because they don't understand its benefits, or maybe they tried it and got confused about the options during installation/configuration. Or maybe they assume it's only about creating clusters/load balancing and/or replication: it's not and can be valuable for many other reasons.

In this talk, veteran CF troubleshooter Charlie Arehart will introduce the topic, presuming you have no prior experience with it. (Note that while it's a feature of CF Enterprise, you can also use it with the free Developer edition, and he'll explain why you may want to.)

What we will (and will not) cover:

We'll address things from the ground up, starting with what the feature is, how it's evolved, and why you should use it in development and/or production. Charlie will demonstrate an installation from scratch, talking about the various choices presented, and proceeding to add another instance and how to demonstrate successful setup. He'll also show connecting the new instance(s) to an external web server and share tips about that.

Along the way Charlie will address such other practical concerns as how to share admin settings among the instances, whether and how to share jvm.config settings, how to find the various logs for each instance, why to be careful about scheduled tasks, how you can monitor the instances, and more. He'll also offer some recommendations that could vary depending on your setup, such why you might want to use the cfusion instance only for creating instances, when/why you may be able to stop and disable the cfusion and admin instances, why you may/may not want to consider sandbox security, and more.

We will not have time to discuss or demonstrate clustering, load balancing, and replication, but can mention it only briefly. If that may be what you'd want to hear more about, please know this is not the talk for that. Perhaps a later talk.

But you will be pointed to many resources available for you to further investigate more on all the things we discuss (with a warning to be careful about older resources which describe an older but still-supported approach to multiple instances, from the CF 6.1 timeframe.)

SPEAKER:

A veteran ColdFusion developer and troubleshooter since 1997 with over 25 years in IT, Charlie Arehart is a longtime contributor to the community and a recognized Adobe Community Expert. As an independent consultant, he provides short-term troubleshooting/tuning assistance and training/mentoring for organizations of all sizes and CF experience levels (carehart.org/consulting). Besides running the 1800-member Online ColdFusion Meetup (coldfusionmeetup.com, an online CF user group), he also hosts the UGTV repository of recorded presentations from hundreds of speakers (carehart.org/ugtv) and the CF411 site of several hundred tools/resources for CFers (cf411.com). A certified Advanced CF Developer and Instructor for CF 4 thru 8, Charlie's spoken at each of the major CF conferences worldwide and is a contributor to all three volumes of Ben Forta's ColdFusion 8 WACK books.

RECORDING: As always, the meeting will be recorded, and the recording URL will be posted after the meeting at http://recordings.coldfusionmeetup.com .

PODCAST/DOWNLOADABLE RECORDINGS:
We are still attempting to make this meeting available as a downloadable recording. If/when available, they will be listed on the recordings page within a few days of the meeting.

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