Multi-site Moodle

[gazlee]

Hi everyone, a bit of background first; I'm at a sixth-form college which is currently in the process of becoming an Academy, and at the same time, starting it's own multi-academy trust. Rather than on-boarding existing establishments though, the other sites will be built by us over the next couple of years so each one will be starting from the ground up in terms of IT and will be adopting our current centralised infrastructure.

 

Obviously this is quite a nice opportunity to get everything right from the start and at the moment our attention has turned to our VLE, Moodle. It's used extensively by our ~2500 students and ~200 staff at the "mothership" campus and ideally we'd like to extend its reach to the other sites so theres one central Moodle, however, in it's current form our existing installation probably isn't going to be able to cope with the extra load (potentially another 1200 students at each site, one of which opens in September). The platform as it stands consists of two Ubuntu Server VMs, one dedicated to running the database on MariaDB, and the other doing the frontend and data storage, running NGINX and PHP-FPM, with a decent 300GB or so of content accross the various courses on there.

 

So I'm faced with a few options as far as I can see:

 

1 - Scale the existing installation out on our VMware platform in terms of resources (more memory, disk space, CPU cores), and allow NGINX and Maria to spin-up more worker processes.

2 - Change to a cluster setup with multiple frontends and a replica database (though I have read that Moodle doesn't officially support clustering too well)

3 - Don't go down the centralised Moodle route and just have a separate instance for each location.

4 - Move it all out to Azure (or similar) and use it to scale on-demand.

 

Concerns that keep coming up are mainly around availability in the event of outages - if the core campus goes offline, the other sites lose access to Moodle. However in the case of Azure, if the satellite campuses lose internet connectivity they're going to lose access anyway. Having multiple installations for each site negates this, but then it becomes a pain to manage when it comes to upgrades, OS patching and courses/enrolments, especially considering the remote sites are going to be limited to having a simple help desk with all second and third line calls coming through to here.

 

Has anyone else been down this road before? If so, what has your experience been like? Or can anyone else see a better way of doing things?

 

Thanks in advance,

Gaz

[MoodleGeek]

Hi Gaz. If you're interested Overnet Data can help with this. As you say the best way is to put a server at each campus, it gives you the best performance, is the most resiliance and makes integrating with local servers easier because you don't have to negotiate traffic through firewalls.

 

We have an on site Moodle management system that allows us (and you if you'd like) to manage large numbers of Moodle servers that are physically located at schools (or any internet connected machine). It allows us to do the remote system administration such as moodle upgrades or module addition/removal, availability and performance monitoring and remote backups. As well as other things such as handling complex network architectures and SSL certificates.

 

If you'd like to know more, please take a look at our website https://www.overnetdata.com/managedvle

Thanks,

Anthony.

[vikpaw]

There's also a pretty slick app they have too.