There are two ways that this can be accomplished, sort of.
1. Run a separate
httpd server (with its own
httpd.conf file) that will listen to only one IP. The server details , including the IP and port that the server should listen on, can then all be contained in the
httpd.conf file that is specific to that instance of
httpd.
2. (Much more likely.) For some time now, the Apache httpd has had the capacity to include other config files in the configuration data via the
Include directive. For nearly that long, there has been a line near the top of my httpd.conf file that says
The effect of this directive is to include any config file that it finds in the named directory (
/etc/httpd/conf.d on my system) in the run-time configuration for a single server that listens on all the IP addresses available to its host machine. This scheme doesn't actually avoid using the Virtual Server setup, but makes it fairly invisible, except to the poor slob who sets it up.