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Illinois Compass System Updates

Illinois Compass Upgrade Update: March 20, 2006

During spring break, CITES is scheduling extended down time of Illinois Compass to replace / upgrade hardware.  The down time is scheduled from 5:30 A.M. on Monday March 20th, until 7:30 A.M. on Tuesday March 21st. 

During this down time, the primary and standby database servers will be replaced.

Background info:

Through various tuning and reconfigurations during the December/January semester break, we have seen overall good performance of the Illinois Compass cluster even through peak loads.  If past semesters are any indication of future trends, we expect to see significantly higher loads toward the end of the semester (starting after spring break and running through finals).  This upgrade should provide continued good performance through the end of the semester as well as position Illinois Compass for future expansions over the next 1-2 years.

Technical Info:

The Illinois Compass cluster consists of a back-end Oracle database and standby database server, numerous front-end servers (users log into) attached to a load balancer and SAN attached storage.  During the down time, we will be replacing an 8 processor SUN V880 back-end database server with a SUN E6900 and replacing the V880 standby server with an E4900. The E6900 and E4900 easily becomes the largest and most redundant servers in the CITES data center (everything is hot-swappable and redundant). The E6900 is configured with 12 dual-core processors and is expandable to 24, the standby server is also configured with 12 dual-core processors. The database server upgrade also allows us to increase the capacity of our front-end servers. In a week to 10 days following the database upgrade, 5 additional dual processor V210 SUN servers will be added to the front-end, bringing the total number of end-user front-end servers to 13, with two additional front-end servers reserved for utility functions (Java messaging server) and administrative purposes (add / creating course sites, etc.).  The installation of the additional front-end servers requires no down time and will be transparent to end-users.

Illinois Compass Upgrade Update: November 23, 2005

We have successfully completed our hardware upgrades and system testing that were planned for November 21-23, 2005. We anticipate no further down time through the end of the Fall 2005 semester, but we are planning for additional improvement of the system that will necessitate down time over winter break.

Accomplishments:

  1. Replaced older application nodes with new Sun V210s

  2. Added an additional application node
    (Achieves consistent environment across application nodes; should improve performance of cluster with additional node and new, faster server models. The system should be more stable during peak usage. System complies with State Audit requirements for access. Patching and updates are simpler. System monitoring now available for all nodes.)

  3. Replaced network switch
    (Allowed us to add additional app node and gives us capacity to add more app nodes to improve performance.)

  4. Database was moved to faster server

  5. Failover database set up with Dataguard

  6. Performed test of failover – successful
    (Faster processors on primary database should give performance and stability boost. We now have production failover capability within 5 minutes of primary system failure.)

  7. Conducted tests of node failures

Changes still needed:

  1. Upgrade test cluster

  2. Rebuild 3 application nodes to match true production framework configurations

  3. Install new Administrative nodes (primary and spare)

  4. Rebuild SIAPI import node to match true production framework configurations

  5. Install spare switch (right now we can swap out in case of failure)

  6. Switch portal login server to new V210 and add spare portal server

Decisions still pending:

  • Load balancer changes and load balancer redundancy
  • Database server upgrade
  • Oracle monitoring

Project History

The project to investigate and choose an enterprise Learning Management System for this campus began in March 2002. It was commissioned by the Chief Information Officer and Provost and given a deadline of August 2004 for the new system to go into production.