Tomcat7 parallel deployment feature: experiences using it on production servers?

Question

We are looking into Tomcat 7's feature to allow multiple versions of the same webapp deployed at the same time:

http://www.tomcatexpert.com/blog/2011/05/31/parallel-deployment-tomcat-7

http://www.javacodegeeks.com/2011/06/zero-downtime-deployment-and-rollback.html

Our sites regularly get 10-20,000 user sessions per day, and quite a lot of them are transactional/stateful type of webapps. Parallel deployment seems perfect for what we want, but I haven't really heard much about people's experiences using it on their servers.

If you use this feature of tomcat 7 in production, have you had any issues with it so far?

Have you had to make any changes to your webapps to "play nice" with this Tomcat feature?

Answer 1

IMHO it's not mature and ready for production yet, e.g. right now you cannot deploy a new context without activating it (i.e. each deploy is hot instantly). But it has potential, should be used in test setups, so people can find the quirks with their respective setups and workflows, and report improvements and problems to the Tomcat team.