We're building up a new load balanced website hosted at Rackspace. It's a pretty decent setup -- single firewall, single router/load balancer with two web servers, each running Windows Server 2003 standard. CF8 is not in the budget for 2009, so I'm working with CF MX 7.02 Enterprise.

I need to be able to create a clustered environment that will allow persistent sessions in the load balanced environment. Anyone have any good instructional resources (books, blogs, articles) for MX7?

I've been able to create instances on different port numbers, but when I try to create remote instances I always get a network error. I checked with rackspace to see if there was some sort of firewall rule blocking traffic between the two servers and they said 'no'.

There is remarkably little information on CF clustering out there. The most comprehensive article I found was Brandon Purcell's huge blog entry on Clustering MX 6.1 http://www.bpurcell.org/viewContent.cfm?ContentID=121 ... but being new to clustering, I really wasn't confident enough to translate his steps to MX7.

I started following the information here: http://cfprimer.blogspot.com/2005_06_01_archive.html but after reinstalling the web server connector as instructed, the enterprise options disappeared from the cf administrator on one of my boxes.

Several forum posts referred to Forta's books on clustering, so I ordered two of the older ones that cover MX7.

As I've been writing this I stumbled across a CF8 clustering article by Mike Brunt -- maybe that will provide more insight. http://www.adobe.com/devnet/coldfusion/articles/coldfusion_scalability.html

Any suggestions are welcome!