WebLogic: The Definitive Guide

Virtual Hosting

Virtual hosting is the ability to run multiple web sites — say, www.domain1.com and www.domain2.com — on a single web server. Name-based virtual hosting implies that you map multiple domain names (or logical hosts) to the same IP address. The fact that both web sites run on the same server is not apparent to the clients. WebLogic Server allows you to create a virtual host for any number of different domain names. For instance, using DNS you could create two different domain names — v1.oreilly.com and v2.oreilly.com — pointing to the same physical WebLogic instance. On this single instance you can create two virtual hosts — say, v1 and v2.

If you have two virtual hosts, you can configure the web server to behave in the following ways:

• You can modify the HTTP behavior of each virtual host independently. For instance, each virtual host can have its own HTTP access logs.

• You can associate a different default web application with each virtual host in the same way that you associate a default web application with a WebLogic Server.

• You can target different WebLogic servers or clusters to different virtual hosts. For instance, if you have mapped different web applications to the virtual hosts, and targeted the web applications to different WebLogic servers, you can effectively target the virtual hosts to the appropriate servers.

Identical web applications are then isolated from each other when they are targeted to different virtual hosts.

Tip

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