The virtualization block documented at :
http://docs.moodle.org/19/en/VMoodle
Will be shifted to Moodle 2 this summer on a team work with Wafa Adham (Palestine) and I.
We hope this will allow facilitating projects deploying big Moodle arrays as we start doing for National Education in France.
We still have to check and make us an idea about networking strategy, if MNET based architecture is on the way to die...
Cheers.
Valery.
Hi Valery,
Sounds very interesting. Is this aimed to improve escalation?
For instance, let say you are a big University and since students usually do not mix degrees you decide to set up a moodle instance for each Center/Faculty (in the European meaning: the center offering a degree program). So most of time users log into their "private" server and there are not many concurrent users at each site.
In that scenario, would be possible for users (students, teachers) to move freely to other vservers? I mean to navigate to courses in other degrees without having to login again, just following a link to the new course/degree.
And, does you setup allow to show a "My courses" navigation block with courses from different vservers??
If all the above is possible, this can be a terrific improvement.
Can you be a little more presise? When do yo expect to release the port to 2.x? (will that include 2.3?).
Hi enrique
Most of your questions would have a "yes" answer :
Actual projets using VMoodle in 1.9 :
One fo the master trak of VMoodle was actually using full power of MNET concept to split a huge moodle in smaller subsets, but keeping the global system consistance. The origin of the feature was the Pairformance program that was adressing 800.000 registered users splitted into 30 smaller subnodes. Main purpose was to :
Actually full SSO and roaming is possible, however adding some small fixes to MNET. We will study the status of Moodle 2 MNET changes to chek if thos points have been resolved, and convert fix strategy appropriately.
This is a real good idea to have a component that could make "federal" answers. There was plan of mine to make a special technical entral hub for that, in order to anwser to questions like :
Where is John right now (on which node) ?
or for centralizing Moodle instant messaging.
These topics were not ordered yet by my stakeholders.
Thes issue in generalizing a peer to peers instant "My course" exploration is of course performance. In big Moodle arrays, you might shoot as many MNET calls as available peers. I tried some kinda architecture on the MNET distributed resource repository for Moodle 1.9 we developped for Intel. In that case (was a n2 omplexity exploration) was the result catastrophic.
If an appropriate strategy of remote enrol using MNET enrol is used, some kinda global course catalog could be displayed to users.
You will have to proceed to a real "topoogy" design to solve macro-architectural behaviours and service policy, but that's fine...
We are starting conversion work right now.