title: How to Properly Configure Multiple RabbitMQ Instances on a Single Server
body: <p>I'm trying to do some clustering testing and I am setting up multiple RabbitMQ services on a single Windows machine. I am able to set the environment variables RABBITMQ_NODENAME, RABBITMQ_SERVICENAME, and RABBITMQ_NODE_PORT then run RabbitMQ-Service Install to have a new RabbitMQ service installed under a different name.</p>
  
  <p>My question is regarding the configuration file. Based on what I read on the RabbitMQ site, the configuration file defaults to the %AppData%\RabbitMQ directory.
  I'm just having trouble trying to understand how it should be setup so I can have 3 instances of the service running with their own configuration.</p>
  
  <p>Do I run the installation under a different local or domain account so it gets placed under a different %AppData%\RabbitMQ directory or can I add a directive to the service to look in a particular directory for the configuration file for that particular service?</p>
  
  <p>Also, how does RABBITMQ_BASE come into play? Is that only for data and log files or does that also apply to the configuration file? I'm not sure if once I have the service setup with BASE defined as a specific path I can place a new rabbitmq.config under the root of that path.</p>
  
  <p>Please confirm and provide any additional assistance. Thank you in advance!</p>
  
  <p>For now I'm testing on Windows but I plan on converting to linux once I have this all working correctly and understood.  Unfortunately, I've inherited the current environment and it's already installed and running using Windows servers.  They just wanted me to setup clustering for it so I'm trying to simulate the cluster on my workstation.</p>