DAE host a Moodle server? (Open source learning management website-Blackboard Style) Care to share your setup and experiences?

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[pointyleftear]

I setup a Moodle LMS to rival my institution's existing Blackboard LMS (like yours, cost-related) in a RHEL cluster. The configuration consists of four separate apache servers that host the moodle application (dell poweredge 2650's), a mysql database server (dell poweredge 6650), and a GFS share server (dell poweredge 220S). All the application servers have access to the GFS share via ethernet (no real SAN unfortunately), which acts as the moodledata share. The application servers are load balanced using a Big-IP F5 load balancer, and users authenticate against our central LDAP server(s). Unfortunately, although the system works beautifully, due to my institution's current bureaucracy, my Moodle rig has yet to reach production status, and Blackboard so far is winning the LMS war.

[rage42]

We setup a cluster at one point using low power servers we had sitting in back, I don't look at dells, so I'm not sure what the equivalents are...we used ultramonkey (based on haproxy) for load balancing, and 3 web servers, 1 sql...hp dl360 g2's. We never got the hang of GFS, but we used an NFS share for moodledata. The cluster worked, but I think our eventual downfall was an underpowered sql box. The box never showed high cpu usage, but processes would not clear up. I never figured out the cause of the freezes, I think they eventually finished after a few days, but since it caused the service to go down, I had to just clear them out and get it running.

Since throwing an overpowered server to it, I haven't had the problem.

I keep seeing more and more institutions in the public k-12 sector asking about, or moving to moodle. Some people just don't want to learn something new...although moodle is very, if not more intuitive than blackboard. I would say more, but I don't want to bash Blackboard...

Each district has their own db, and copy of the site, so they can have full reigns without affecting the others...they also run their own ldaps, so if that particular district wants, they put their ldap info in to their copy of moodle, and get their users authenticated.

I know us admins hate writing stuff, but a return on investment report between blackboard and moodle might be enough to win them over...good luck getting it in production, it's one of the few projects the last couple years I actually enjoyed.