I've misphrased. What documentation I've come across indicates that
Apache (or IIS) is necessary to configure tomcat as a cluster. It very
well may be possible, which is why I'm asking the list. The main
feature that I'm looking for in this configuration is the session
failover ability. I have a hardware load-balancer, so load-balancing is
not exactly what I was looking for...just the session sharing.
Does your hardware load balancer support sticky sessions?
If it does, you can use Tomcat's HTTP connector, and configure your balancer as if Tomcat were a web server (which it is, when you use that connector).
If it doesn't I personally recommend getting one that does ;-) or using Apache + mod_jk / mod_jk2. Use the hardware balancer and 2 Apache for high availability.
Other than that, there is in-memory or JDBC session clustering (uncomment two elements from your server.xml, and you are mostly done). That implies that objects stored in sessions need to be Serializable. Performance impact will depend on your webapp design, so YMMV. I only tried in-memory a few months ago, and performance dropped seriously, but it worked without problem. Most likely our webapp's fault. You may encounter issues with frames and similar constructs. See the docs.
HTH,
Antonio Fiol
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