We have a production environment with externally load-balanced Tomcat servers running on multiple servers, serving HTTP requests and maintaining stick sessions.
Due to lack of complete build and deployment process (unfortunately I don't see that's happening anywhere in near future !), there is an Ops team, which is responsible for copying JSPs / Classes / static resources / Properties files or even changing struts-config.xml (sometimes web.xml !) manually. We don't build WARs !!
Since it's manual intensive work, a human error creates lot of problems because the same steps have to be executed on multiple environments (on a deployment day, it could be around 10 machines atleast), and that makes debugging even complicated.
I do understand we are far from ideal production environment (for that matter even practical production env.) but I was just brainstorming and thought what if we can install (copy) Tomcat on high-speed SAN and mount it as a shared drive on each server so that atleast the changes will go to all nodes simulatenously.
Please let me know your thoughts and espcially criticism in this approach.
Thanks.