This might seem like an odd thing to do, as what I am going do do here is simply add a link to one of our previous blog posts. The reason is that there is a really interesting and informative discussion going on about High Availability (HA), on Windows 2003 and ColdFusion. There is some very informative information there and this is not theory but an actaul user adding their experiences with HA and clustering.
HA High Availability – Great Discussion
May 8, 2008
DougHughes.net 
Comments on: "HA High Availability – Great Discussion" (3)
Hi Mike. I was waiting to read the rest of your series on setting up CF8 clusters but we took the plunge and did it anyway.
The first problem we had was upgrading from CF7 to CF8.01. I ran the installer assuming it would remove CF7 first or just overwrite it. Wrong! Despite specifiying the existing installation directories it was totally unaware of CF7 and we ended up with “500” errors and both CF7 and CF8 shown in Add/Remove Program (on Win2003).
We restored the web server from the last nightly backup and started over again, this time uninstalling CF7 first and rebooting. Frustratingly the instance we created for clustering was still showing as a service and many files in c:jrun4 were still there. So the lesson learnt (after restoring the backup again) was to go into CF Admin and delete the instances and cluster first before uninstalling CF because the uninstaller is blissfully unaware of any instances you’ve created.
The uninstaller appeared to leave references to CF instances in IIS’s configuration. Perhaps we should have used the CF Web Config Tool to delete its associations with IIS before uninstalling CF7?
We eventually managed to get CF8.01 installed and working in a 2 server cluster. Windows NLB remained in place to handle IIS load balancing. Weirdly a session would bounce from server A to server B and back again each time we fresh the page in the browser. Round Robin and Sticky Sessions are used so this behaviour shouldn’t be happening and wasn’t happening in our previous CF7 cluster.
While our application web pages are served quickly the CF Admin is very slow to respond.
Any thoughts on any of the above issues would be great thanks, and I hope some of our experience with upgrading CF in a cluster is useful to someone.
LikeLike
@Gary, I am going to move your extensive comment here over to the main blog piece and respond there, thanks.
LikeLike
Good Article,
http://www.supply-batteries.co.uk
http://www.shop-batteries.com
LikeLike