Mutliple VMs for Tomcat cluster vs Multiple Tomcat instances on one physical box
- by Greymeister
I'm working on a project that will be implemented into production using a cluster of Apache Tomcat instances and I'm looking for the best Hardware/OS solutions and VMs have come up as one option. I have run ESXi/ESX instances before for development and testing, but I'm curious for a hosting environment if having multiple VMs is actually worse than just configuring a server to host multiple instances of Tomcat. These are my guesses:
Pros for VMWare
Easier Maintenance/Backup for individual VMs (VMWare makes this easy)
Can remote login to individual VMs without having to give host access (security?)
Easier way to re-purpose machine for OS/Hardware changes
Pros for running on one Physical Machine
Overhead of only one OS (also no VMWare footprint)
Update OS/security changes once
One less administrative layer (No VM expertise required)
I'm curious if anyone has any other ideas about what the benefits would be for either option.