In a single instance (or cluster) of JBoss Portal, multiple portals can be running and share resources with other portals with two levels of granularity:

The highest-level component of Red Hat JBoss Portal (JBoss Portal) is the portal container. A portal container can host multiple Sites. Those two components have a unique identifier that can be found in the default URL mapping according to the following scheme: http://localhost:8080/<portalcontainer>/<site>

When creating a website, you can either create a portal container or extend an existing one. Extending an existing portal container, such as the default one provided with JBoss Portal, is the recommended option because you only need to customize it to suit your requirements. Another benefit of the extension method is that upgrades consist of copying the newer distribution archives in place of the originals. This upgrade method is not possible if the distribution archives have been modified.

While running multiple portal containers is possible, it is recommended to keep those on separate installations. Note that multiple websites can run in a single portal container and share some services.

The procedure for creating portal containers and extending existing portal containers is similar: create an enterprise archive (EAR) containing configuration details, runnable code and static resources.