I'd like to establish a cluster of JBoss AS7 servers. I've found that it may be done using apache with mod_proxy or with mod_cluster. Which one would you use? Which one is easier to establish and maintain? Which provides better performance?
Use modcluster.
mod_cluster has Server-side load balance factor calculation and Fine grained web-app lifecycle control.
see "Advantages" at http://www.jboss.org/mod_cluster .