First Moodle Install, Need Help

First Moodle Install, Need Help

by Van Howell -
Number of replies: 3

We are currently using WebCT and are going to DUMP it, ASAP. I setup a Moodle demo environment using an old Dell PowerEdge 4600 with 2 2.4 Ghz Xeon processors. I currently only have 2 Gb of RAM in the machine and a SCSI RAID with 255 GB of storage. For the demo I setup XenSource's Virtual Machine Monitor and installed 2 virtual machines each running CentOS 4.4 with 786Mb of ram for each Virtual server. I installed MySQL 4.1.20 on one and Apache2.0.52 /PHP4.3.9 on the other. I installed Moodle 1.8 for the demo. The only setup issues I had were related to SELinux configuration, IPTables, and our ISA firewall, everything else went swimmingly.

The Demo went well and the Deans approved us switching to Moodle. So now I get to build a real Moodle system.

Our University has @ 2000 students that will be using Moodle. I would like to stay with Linux. I am leaning towards CentOS 5 (Official release anounced April 12), MySQL 5.0, PHP 5.1.6 and Apache 2.2. I also want to stay with virtual servers (better processor utilization). I plan on using the same server (Dell PowerEdge 4600) because we have to keep WebCT up on the newer equipment while we make the transition. I will upgrade the server RAM to the max of 12GB.

1. Are there any known issues with these package versions for my proposed LAMP configuration.

2. When setting up the two virtual servers to run Moodle should I evenly devide the RAM or should I give MySQL server more than the Web server or vise versa?

3. Once the newer hardware is available (WebCT gone for good) how could I best utilize it (Dell PowerEdge 1850, 1-2.8 GHz Dual Core Xeon, 8 Gb RAM, 2-300Gb Hard Drive, Mirrored)?

4. Any other suggestions would be appreciated.

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In reply to Van Howell

Re: First Moodle Install, Need Help

by andy choo -
Hi Van,

That's sounds great!
I do have some Moodle Training Resources at hand, wondering whether if you will like to make use of them for training your staffs?

Andy
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In reply to Van Howell

Re: First Moodle Install, Need Help

by Visvanath Ratnaweera -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Translators
> We are currently using WebCT and are going to DUMP it, ASAP. ... The Demo went well and the Deans approved us switching to Moodle. So now I get to build a real Moodle system.

Welcome to the boat!

Your number of users is not large. As you would expect, a) the numbe of _concurrent_ users b) what "activities" they are involved in are the key factors for performance. Your starting points are:
- http://docs.moodle.org/en/Performance

- discussions in this forum. Do a search in this forum.

Linux is a good choice. CentOS is going to be your guest OSes, I guesss. What is the host OS? What technology, XEN?

> 1. Are there any known issues with these package versions for my proposed LAMP configuration.

You are going for Moodle 1.8. Haven't installed myself, but the Apache and MySQL versions should be OK, somebody else has to confirm the PHP version.

> 2. When setting up the two virtual servers to run Moodle should I evenly devide the RAM or should I give MySQL server more than the Web server or vise versa?

Hard question. Webserver is more CPU intensive, MySQL depends more on the disk system. Since you have plenty of RAM they can be used to do the caching. PHP+Accelerator combination can utilize RAM well. Donno about MySQL.

> 3. Once the newer hardware is available (WebCT gone for good) how could I best utilize it (Dell PowerEdge 1850, 1-2.8 GHz Dual Core Xeon, 8 Gb RAM, 2-300Gb Hard Drive, Mirrored)?

What do you want to optimize? Reliability or performance. With only 2 hard drives you can only the former, I guess.

HTH
Visvanath

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In reply to Visvanath Ratnaweera

Re: First Moodle Install, Need Help

by Van Howell -

That's correct, I am using CenOS for the Guest OS. The Host I am using is a packaged product from XenSource (http://www.xensource.com/) I believe it is build on RedHat kernel 2.6.16.29-xs3.1.0.289.2650xen. This company has a Open source product as well as a comercial product. I really like their Administrative console. I am running on v 3.1 of XenExpress I had some problems with the modifications I made in the Admin Console templates in Version 3.2.

I am planning on using a PHP accelerator but I do not know which one to use. Any suggestions?

I was consitering the posibility of clustering the MySQL with the new hardware but I ran accross a thread that mentioned that the MySQL cluster is not compatible with Moodle. Any info on that?

Thanks for the help.

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