[Architecture] approach for running multiple instances on one machine

[Sanjiva Weerawarana]

As a scale-up approach and to better utilize large CPUs (>= 4 cores), we've
recently discussed running multiple nodes (or instances or JVMs) on one
machine instead of running just one JVM. That of course means each node has
to have its own ports. We have to make that easy - make it simple to run
multiple instances off one software installation. Not a big deal really,
just a matter of putting logs/ etc. under a nodes/{nodename} directory of
some sort. There are some questions though:

- do we have only one config and have the node auto start with ports,
ports+1 etc. or do we have different configs for each node? My feeling is
that different configs is a different thing - then effectively you're
running different servers.
- if the ports are all externally visible, then the service clients have to
pick a port to connect to. Can we do better? What if we set up an Apache
httpd (or similar) process in front of the Java processes and have it
forward requests to the two nodes. If the nodes are set up with session
state sharing (presumably that's very fast on the local machine) then we can
have effectively an HA environment.

What else? It'll be good if we can make this standard behavior for all
Carbon servers from March. There's no code changes I think; just config
only.

Sanjiva.
-- 
Sanjiva Weerawarana, Ph.D.
Founder, Chairman & CEO; WSO2, Inc.;  http://wso2.com/
email: sanjiva at wso2.com; phone: +1 408 754 7388 x51726; cell: +94 77 787
6880
blog: http://sanjiva.weerawarana.org/

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