Adventures in Moodle 2 and Delivering a High Availability and Performant Site

Every Indiana Jones adventure has a few key ingredients; a priceless lost treasure, a relentless enemy, a map with many cryptic clues, lots of mishaps and capers, some friendly faces to lend a hand when things get tough and finally, the hero, who outwits his enemies, retrieves the glittering prize and saves the day for everyone.

Waterford Institute of Technology, with the help of HEAnet, had a similar adventure when constructing the server infrastructure to host it's new Moodle 2 site during 2012. This short presentation will recount the intrepid journey which took us from a 'one server per application' model hosting the institutes Moodle 1.9 site to a fully virtualised, fault tolerant and high availability cluster hosting Moodle 2 - with the occasional Indiana Jones reference thrown in for good measure!

Transcript

2. Cathal O’Riordan Waterford Institute of Technology eLearning Support Unit @coriordan
4. building our Moodle 2 site was a little bit like an adventure …
5. first, we needed to Find the right path
6. isilon-NFS wit-moodle-web Apache wit-moodle-db MySQL OneFS does our Moodle 1.9 architecture look familiar to you?
7. isolon-NFS wit-moodle-web Apache wit-moodle-db MySQL OneFS
11. and here’s what we came up with …
12. Dell PowerEdge R620 •2 * Intel Xeon E5-2640 (12 cores) •2.5GHz 15M Cache CPU •96 GB RAM (12 * 8GB) •VMware ESXi 5.0 X2
13. Web Server 1 Web Server 2 Web Server 3 Network File System Load Balancer (master) Load Balancer (slave) Database (master) Database (slave)
14. Web Server 1 Web Server 2 Web Server 3 Network File System Load Balancer (master) Load Balancer (slave) Database (master) Database (slave) •IPVS •heartbeat Apache 2.2.14 + PHP-FPM •MySQL 5.1 •DRBD 8.3 •heartbeat
16. and there were some challenges too …
17. performance tuning is difficult
18. 1. establish a baseline e.g. 20 users login and access ‘My Moodle’ page, ten times each.
19. 2.use a performance tool • ab • jMeter • Siege • Blitz, blitz.io • Blazemeter, blazemeter.com
20. 3.start small and build
21. bonus tip!
22. and finally, the adventure brought great reward …
23. no silly! not this kind of reward
25. THE END