Installing Tomcat 6 on Windows 2008 server 64bit

Tomcat installation is actually composed of 2 parts:

1. Installing Java Runtime Environment.
2. Installing Tomcat.

In order to install Tomcat 6 on Windows 2008 server, you first have to download and install Java JRE for 64bit. The latest JRE can be easily downloaded from Sun’s website.
As it is for now, Tomcat doesn’t have 64bits version. In order to be able to run Tomcat 6 on Windows 2008 server 64bit, you will first have to download and install Tomcat 6 for 32bit and then download tomcat6.exe and tomcat6w.exe supporting 64bits from Apache svn repository. Replace the files located under Tomcat’s “bin” directory with these 2 files. These are actually the only 2 native files Tomcat is using to run as a Service. Running Tomcat as a service is necessary to be able to start the server, even if there is no user logged to the system.