an integrated moodle system using vm technology to achive higher availability and lower tco
This paper describes the methodology of the Moodle system which we constructed using VM technology in the Center for Information Science at KIT. Before changing to Moodle, we had been using a Learning Management System (LMS) called Blackboard. However, it was very costly and we could not apply any modifications to it. Therefore, we decided to replace it. Our requirements of the new LMS system were as follows: (a) lower TCO including hardware and software, (b) high availability, and (c) easy to modify the system software from the educational and administrative point of view. To satisfy these requirements, we made up our mind to replace Blackboard with Moodle and to introduce virtual machine technology. Moodle is an open-source software LMS and runs on LAMP/LAPP (Linux, Apache, MySQL or PostgreSQL and PHP) environment. The key ideas of our the system configurations are: (1) use two server PCs, (2) run four web servers and two database/ NFS servers on different virtual machines, and (3) introduce mirroring. The contents on NFS and database servers are assured by using "lsyncd" for real time mirroring and "pgpool" for database replication and fail over.
moodle lower tco high availability lapp