In Tridion R5 we have two deployer services running on our server (linux based) and both serves the request.
Is it possible to have multiple deployers in 2009? We want to distribute the load (Active/Passive Deployer) in our current setup.
Could you please let me know if this can be achieved?
Thanks for your inputs and let me know for any information.
You cannot have 2 Active/Active deployers for load balancing because of how the transport deals with the status of the messages. It can (and it will) happen that the transport will ask the "wrong" deployer for the status of a transaction, and the answer will be misunderstood by the transport, resulting in "failed" transactions that may not actually be failed.
With 2011 and higher you could always play with the number of deployer threads (not without its own challenges), but in 2009 really all that the deployer does is single-threaded FIFO.
If you're publishing from various publications, then you could/should play with using different publication targets (not Target Types, no need to confuse your editors) for the different publications, so that publish transactions from publication "A" go into Deployer "A" and publish transactions from publication "B" go into Deployer "B". If all transactions are from the same publication, then you're more limited in options.
As Nuno points out, you can't have two deployers picking up the same transport package; it is a recipe for disaster.
An option (and maybe the only one) is to have multiple destinations on one publish target, where one destination publishes to the active deployer and one to the passive one. If the active web server fails for some reason, you can switch to the passive one and make that active.
This way, content on both front end environments (active / passive) stay in sync with each other, because if one destination fails a publish action, the whole publish action (so, for both destinations) fails, which is something you'll want. For this scenario, you will need to have two separate deployers (which you need anyway), one for each destination.
Bear in mind that you cannot share resources (like a network share or a broker database) for both deployers. You can of course use a share or the same Broker database with multiple web servers connected to each deployer if you need to have fail-over capability for each logical destination group.
