I'm wondering if somebody has ever tried running multiple instances of Filemaker server on one machine, a bit like running several web sites on one machine.

I could imagine that this could be possible, given a high bandwidth network connection, fast hard drives and processor and an OS of the *nix flavor.

Reason to do this would be to offer affordable Filemaker Server services to third parties, since using a separate machine for every client would be considerably more expensive.

Anybody any ideas about this?

Regards,

Ernst.

How you will separate the traffic from single IP and single port 5003?

And how will third parties connect to that machine? Are they on the same network?

I could imagine the following scenario:

-each instance of FMServer assigned a different IP address

-machine with multiple IP addresses assigned to the same ethernetport

-third parties would connect via a broadband connection, server would be located in an ISP's server room

-third parties would have a unique global IP address in this case

Even nicer would be to have them share one global IP address and then have a DNS server that would assign

fmserver1.hostname.com to 192.68.1.1

fmserver2.hostname.com to 192.68.1.2

:

:

fmserver.otherhostname.com to 192.168.1.xxx

But I think this last option would require a form of routing that is quit likely not possible with FMPro.

Regards,

Ernst.

It wouldn't work. FM server hates multiple IP.

Broadband connection is not good enough. It will be slower, than FM server on Pentium 1 80Mhz. FMS is $999 or less, HW $400-500. OS Linux -- free, W2k $130.

How much will be just T1, slow as snail?

FM server is maintenance free, maintaining all that IP/routers/DNS + 2-5 T1.

It will be financial disaster.

Hi Anatoli,

>>FM server hates multiple IP.

This is what I was actualy wondering about.

>>It will be financial disaster.

I did some testing with my poor 16KByte/Sec connection, which gave me the feeling that you would indeed need at least a 10 times faster connection to get a 'sort of' usable result.

Combining the cost of this high demand on bandwidth with the cost a single machine + license for every client leads indeed to your conclusion.

Thanks for your clear advise,

Ernst.

However, to host FM Unlimited or MySQL and share that through Lasso or WebCompanion and custom CDML or LDML pages can be financially sound setup.

We have machine like that for various clients and they are happy with everything. But it is more time/labor consuming job.

I have multiple sessions of FM server 5.5 running on 1 P3 700 server.

No problems.

I installed Virtual PC from Connextion, wich allows multiple windows sessions to run on one server.

It works more then fine here.

over 200 FM files hosted on 1 machine.

Interesting idea

Does each session have it's own IP address?

Virtual pc emulates a whole new pc.

So its like getting a new pc on the network with an own ip and macadres.

Is there any analogous to this that would allow multiple sessions if FMS were running under Linux, say on the New Millennium Toshiba FM Server System?