title: Guide to setting up Apache2 with multiple distinct Tomcat 7 instances
body: <p>I realize this question has probably been asked numerous times, but I have not been able to find a good, up-to-date answer. The only guide I have been able to find was from 2005 and was on tomcat 5. It seems a lot of the OS paths have changed.</p>
  
  <p>Our situation is this:</p>
  
  <p>We want to run multiple instances of tomcat 7 on a single server. Each tomcat serves up a different address. For instance, <code>www.oursite.com</code> should be served from a separate tomcat than <code>test.oursite.com</code>. So, for example the base tomcat installtion will sit in <code>/opt/tomcat/</code> and the instance specific directories (this is what I could make out from that old tutorial) will be in <code>/home/user1/some/path/</code> and <code>/home/user2/some/path</code> so that everything is seperated nicely.</p>
  
  <p>Can anyone point to a good tutorial, or maybe explain here the steps to set this up? I'm a bit new to apache setups.</p>
  
  <p>Are there any advantages / drawbacks to doing it this way? Would a single tomcat instance be better? We need to be able to bring down sites one at a time without influencing each other. Also, our DNS provider prevents us from setting up stealth redirects, so we have to go through apache to have nice URLs rather than redirecting straight to the tomcats.</p>
  
  <p>Thanks</p>