Time for action – configuring a cluster

In the configuration schema, we didn't mention the hardware. Of course, having software redundancy while deploying all components on a single physical server is not a good idea. You can deploy each component on a separate server (and in modern server farm they will probably be virtual ones), but the basic idea is that you should never have all the instances of a component on a single machine.

For the sake of simplicity, and to save you having to buy a lot of hardware, we will use a single Linux machine in the following section:

1. As a first step, we will relocate the configuration folder out of the GeoServer web archive. Stop the Tomcat service:

   ~$ sudo service tomcat stop

2. Now move the folder to an external location:

   ~$ sudo mv /opt/apache-tomcat-7.0.27/webapps/geoserver/data /opt/geoserver_config

3. Now you have to edit the web.xml file to make GeoServer aware of the new configuration folder:

   ~$ sudo vi /opt/apache-tomcat-7.0.27/webapps/geoserver/WEB-INF/web...