Case Study: Modernizing a Government Web Farm Through Virtualization

Industry: Government (Customer Anonymous)

Services Provided: Virtualization Architecture, Tomcat Application Hosting, Security Hardening, Firewall Modernization, TLS Upgrades, Performance Tuning

Outcome: Full migration of a physical Tomcat web farm into a resilient, secure, and high-performance virtual infrastructure

Background

A large anonymous government agency operated a mission-critical Tomcat-based web farm running on aging physical RHEL servers. While the platform had functioned adequately for years, the hardware lifecycle was ending, and the system lacked the flexibility, resiliency, and security controls expected in a modern environment.

The organization needed to transition to virtual servers to reduce hardware risk, improve maintainability, strengthen security posture, and streamline operations—all without service disruption.

Christian was engaged to lead the migration planning, web farm transformation, network/security redesign, and performance tuning.

Challenges

The environment presented several obstacles:

  • Aging physical hardware with increasing failure rates
  • Limited scalability and no ability to quickly provision or adjust capacity
  • Outdated firewall configurations using legacy port openings and flat rules
  • Obsolete TLS versions and weak cipher suites incompatible with current federal standards
  • Performance bottlenecks caused by inconsistent tuning across servers
  • Operational risk due to minimal documentation and inconsistent system configurations

While the OS images were not built by Christian, all application hosting, migration orchestration, security validation, and performance optimization fell under his responsibility.

Solution Approach

1. Virtualization Migration Strategy

The first step was to design a clear, low-risk migration path from physical to virtual:

  • Worked with the customer’s virtualization team to understand hypervisor capabilities and VM provisioning models
  • Performed an application compatibility review to validate Tomcat, JVM, and RHEL versions
  • Identified system dependencies, storage requirements, and underlying network flows
  • Built a step-by-step migration plan including validation, cutover, and fallback strategies

This ensured a predictable, controlled transition.

2. Web Farm Reconstruction in the Virtual Environment

Once the VMs were provisioned by the customer, we rebuilt the web farm configuration layer:

  • Installed and configured Tomcat across the new virtual servers
  • Applied consistent directory structures, JVM settings, and environment variables
  • Ensured parity with the legacy system while removing outdated or unused components
  • Implemented startup routines
  • Validated connectivity to backend databases, SSO/IdP layers, file transfer endpoints, and external APIs

This eliminated configuration drift and standardized operations across the entire farm.

3. Firewall & Network Security Modernization

To meet modern government security requirements, a full firewall/access review was completed:

  • Identified all required inbound/outbound rules
  • Removed legacy or unnecessary ports and services
  • Documented complete application traffic flows for agency security teams
  • Segmented traffic between tiers and introduced improved logging/monitoring paths
  • Ensured compatibility with SSL offloaders or load balancers (if applicable)

The result was a cleaner, more secure network posture with traceable, auditable rules.

4. TLS Modernization & Compliance Upgrades

The customer’s existing servers ran outdated TLS protocols (TLS 1.0/1.1), weak ciphers, and legacy keystores. As part of the modernization:

  • Upgraded the application stack to TLS 1.2 and TLS 1.3
  • Removed insecure cipher suites and protocols
  • Rebuilt keystores using modern standards
  • Validated certificate chains, expiration, and renewal paths
  • Ensured compatibility with load-balancing and reverse proxy endpoints

This brought the application environment into alignment with current federal security mandates.

5. Performance Tuning & Reliability Engineering

Once the virtual farm was operational, extensive tuning was performed:

  • Adjusted JVM heap sizes, garbage collection settings, and thread pools
  • Tuned RHEL system parameters to support higher concurrency
  • Optimized Tomcat connectors (APR/native or NIO) for improved throughput
  • Reduced latency by aligning NIC, MTU, and multipath settings
  • Validated VM resource sizing to prevent CPU ready time and memory ballooning
  • Conducted comparative load tests between physical and virtual environments

These optimizations resulted in higher performance in the virtual environment than on the original hardware.

Results

The migration delivered significant improvements across stability, security, and operational efficiency:

  • Successful physical → virtual migration with zero production downtime
  • Modernized security posture including updated firewall rules and TLS 1.2/1.3 enforcement
  • Standardized Tomcat environment with consistent, documented configurations
  • Improved performance due to JVM tuning and optimized connector settings
  • Enhanced scalability through virtual infrastructure elasticity
  • Lower operational cost and risk due to removal of aging hardware
  • Better observability through improved logging and monitoring integration

The updated web farm now supports agency applications with increased reliability, compliance, and long-term maintainability.

Key Technologies Used

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
  • Apache Tomcat / TomEE
  • TLS 1.2 / 1.3 configuration & keystore management
  • Firewall modernization and port segmentation
  • Virtualization (VMWare, Hyper-V, or government-approved hypervisor)
  • JVM performance tuning
  • Load balancers / reverse proxies
  • Systemd service management