I am a network engineer in charge of a Windows 2003 server running Moodle 2.5.4. I need to upgrade my server as Microsoft is pulling support for 2003 in July 2015. Will my version of Moodle work on the Windows Server 2012 platform? Thanks for your help. --- Craig
Yes, Moodle runs great on Windows Server 2012. I would recommend Windows Server 2012 R2. I also recommend upgrading your Moodle installation since 2.5.x isn't supported anymore.
the word "great" might be going a little far though. My experience has been that the same hardware running on linux can often be tuned to cope with a larger capacity than windows server.
If you really have to run windows the best performance configuration I've seen so far is:
Latest version of Moodle
PHP 5.5 with https://docs.moodle.org/en/OPcache
Then the wincache plugin with opcode cache disabled for MUC (otherwise it conflicts with built in 5.5. opcache)
https://moodle.org/plugins/view/tool_wincache
when you install wincache it will have opcode enabled by default - you MUST disable this otherwise it conflicts with the built-in opcode.
The next step would be to modify the wincache code to work for Moodle sessions (at the moment it doesn't support this) - doing that would help to improve performance even further.
We are running Server 2012 R2, PHP 5.6.6 with opcache enabled. We average 300-500 users logged-in at a time, no performance issues. 12 core Xeon CPU, 64 GB of RAM.
sure - if you throw enough hardware at it you can get it to work ok, but my experience has shown that the same hardware can scale higher under linux based distributions than it can when running windows. Of course I do understand that there are cases where Windows is the only option for internal political reasons or lack of internal knowledge.
Dan, does Memcache(d) fit in there anywhere?
Wincache can be used instead of memcache (although I haven't done any qualitative comparisons of wincache vs memcache on a windows server.)
My typical experience with people running windows as a server for Moodle is because they like all things Microsoft. Wincache is developed and supported by Microsoft and appears to work well as a MUC store. The only "problem" is that the Moodle plugin hasn't been developed (yet) to allow wincache to be used to store the session (memcache has). It wouldn't be hard to modify the existing code to add support for wincache to store the sessions. Used in conjunction with PHP 5.5 and the built in opcode with the latest Moodle code I've seen Moodle perform a lot better than some other configurations I've seen.