What is the best way to host potentially dozens of fairly trivial Java web applications on a single machine? These will be for different clients, and so having them isolated from each other is important, so that if one goes down, they don't all go down. I realize Tomcat can handle multiple apps on its own, but having them all run in a single tomcat instance sounds a little scary to me. An instance of tomcat per app also seems silly, since these apps are likely to be fairly basic.
Any thoughts?
Best Answer
If they're fairly simple, it's probably not too likely that they will bring the entire server down, so you can run all of them on one or a few instance(s).
If they're not really that simple, or if there are security concerns, then separate them. If there are strong security concerns, even separate them into multiple virtual machines.