Splitting CMIS & Eportal - advice required

[bigdpm]

Greeting Edugeeks!

I am splitting eportal & cmis to two seperate servers.

I am looking to leave eportal on the old server and move CMIS to a VMware box as a virtual server, (vastly superior hw spec to the old cmis box). Two questions if I may?

1. Am I creating problems for myself!
2. Any advice on what/how to "point" eportal to the new server (eg what files do I need to change etc)

Thanks
Denis Murphy
Christ's College Finchley

[tosca925]

Our is split on 2 servers but it was installed this way.

Serco installed this and advised us of this set up.

As for helping, i'd be at a loss really.

[BarriedaleNick]

I havent done it myself but I have talked to someone who did and I have looked at it but not done it yet..

Basically you need to set the CMISController database connector to point to the new CMIS SQL databaseon your VMWare server.

Go to the old server and start the Facility Controller
Click Server settings
Click the Server Settings tab
Click on Connection and select an existing (or create a new ODBC) connection to the new server..

You will need to remember to change paths in the ePortal config file to point at new student photo directories etc...

Let me know how you get on

The Serco Learning Web Site does have some stuff on this I think..

[lazypole]

Interestingly our original set up of CMIS was on two servers, our LEA support didn't like that, but it did work quite well. We just had to remember to start and stop services in the correct order for the two to cooperate. As in the last post from BarrieDaleNick.
The LEA have reconfigured now to run on a single server and I think this is causing more problems than the two server solution. Reckon you are right to do this and will improve the service using the two server solution.

[openhgs]

We too were runnng on a split server. On the split server the Apcahe Tomcat daemon would run but eportal would often be unavailable as it would lose communication with the sql database. Restarting eportal related servers on both machines would resolve the issue. We now run on a single server and eportal runs under IIS. On this server IIS crashes regularly and so again Eportal is not available. Strangley however Eportal as served by Apache Tomcat is much more reliable than it was on the split server. Those users "in the know" access via Tomcat.

Monitoring our server has shown than if more that one user attempts to access Eportal at a time, the various daemons are likely to crash. Eportal is very resource hungry. Get the beefiest box you can (preferably something like a Cray XMP ) and the fastest network available and your eportal setup might be OK.

[SpuffMonkey]

I split ours onto 2 servers under advice from Serco to stop the constant ePortal crashing - it frankly made no difference at all. What made it all stable were the registry entries to restrict Java memory usage - since those we've had very little trouble.

[kylewilliamson]

Which are these then?

[tosca925]

What made it all stable were the registry entries to restrict Java memory usage - since those we've had very little trouble

Yes I would be intersted to know this as well.

[Lee_K_81]

We're just about to move away from a split installation, although that being said, eportal was on a 500MHz server with 750MG Ram, and CMIS is on a DC that does DNS, DHCP, Monitoring SW and staff user areas, so not the best set-up.

To be honest, I dont think that either solution is much better than the other. It all depends on the hardware. Our helpdesk have said that they've seen it work (or not) both ways.

[SpuffMonkey]

What made it all stable were the registry entries to restrict Java memory usage - since those we've had very little trouble

Yes I would be intersted to know this as well.

OK - this is what sorted ePortal for us -

Tweaks to improve stability of ePortal


HKey_Local_Machine/Software/Apache Software Foundation/ProcRun 2.0/Facility Tomcat5/Parameters/Java

Change JvmMs to decimal 128 and JvmMx to decimal 512

[budgester]

Also be aware that eportal will not run on IIS if 64bit windows is used.

You will have to go direct to the tomcat server.

[john316]

We're just about to move away from a split installation, although that being said, eportal was on a 500MHz server with 750MG Ram, and CMIS is on a DC that does DNS, DHCP, Monitoring SW and staff user areas, so not the best set-up.

To be honest, I dont think that either solution is much better than the other. It all depends on the hardware. Our helpdesk have said that they've seen it work (or not) both ways.

A 500mhz server with 750mb odd of RAM? :P

We've just split our CMIS onto 2 servers and it has made a major difference. Our 'old' server (Dual Xeon 2.8ghz) was upgraded to 4gb of RAM from 2gb and our 'new' ePortal server (Dual Xeon 5110 CPUs) is running 4gb of RAM as well. The upgrade to the main CMIS server plus the addition of a dedicated ePortal server has made a massive difference to performance and reliability thus far on ePortal and CMIS.

[Zaphyr]

We use a split installation that runs fine (touch wood), the main problem we have had in the past was with the data server service crashing when the automatic scheduled caching for the eportal administrator account was carried out at night. The LEA added what I think are the same tweaks that tosca925 mentioned and this along with the fact that I stop (or kill) and restart the data server service after the caching is carried out each night seem to have resolved the issue.

I recently upgraded the eportal server onto a new box and got it up and running following the documentation that comes as part of the install. (Well until I had to go cap in hand to the LEA for the passwords needed to install the certificates for the ssl connection). So wouldn't imagine it can be too onerous to split them up.

I have also played with CMIS/Eportal on VMWare, using VMWare Converter to create a VM of the old Eportal server, which was also the old original CMIS server before they were split. This seems to run fine under VMWare Player, both the CMIS side which I have restored using a backup from the main CMIS server and the Eportal side which will happily connect to the main CMIS server. Apart from some well documented problems with a release of the Converter (which were overcome by downloading a newer version) this in fact went frighteningly well.

[mjellings]

Hi There,

In most cases I've come across ePortal has run better when split between 2 servers. Obviously this is related to the hardward involved and specs of each server, i.e. it'll run better one big powerful server as opposed to two lower spec servers. Generally speaking however splitting them up does help. The registry tweaks people have mentioned may prove a good idea.

Additionally as long as you allocate sufficient resources to the virtual pc there shouldn't be any problem running it from a virtual machine.

Thanks.

Matt

[michael2k6]

Something to bare in mind is that CMIS and ePortal can be quite heavy on disk usage. Many people stick another processor in or double their RAM but forget about the old SCSI 160 Non RAID disks they have. SCSI 320 is a good start.

Do the best you can with RAID, the more disks and partitions you can have for splitting the OS, Data files and Page files, the better.