[Building Sakai] Questions regarding Sakai configuration for multiple schools

[Matthew Jones]

Hi Myeong,

I'll try to respond to your questions.

Q1: Is there a way to group course sites according to their school or
> department? Ideally, we hope to set a hierarchical structure of course sites
> such as University -> Schools -> Departments -> courses.
>

Currently, Sakai only allows for a very basic "pseudo-hierarchy" of
parent->child sites. It is described in this message with related word doc.
[1] There was a session at the conference 2 years ago in Boston where were
talking about expanding on this [2] but not much more has happened. The
parent-child only shows breadcrumbs between sites and is really unlikely to
be what you're looking for. Some tools such as evaluation have built upon
the hierarchy service [3], but these are not part of the core, and not
fully implemented. [3]

Q2: If the hierarchical approach in Q1 is not feasible, do we need to set up
> a separate SAKAI server for each school? What is the general way to
> configure SAKAI for multiple schools and departments?
>

Some schools host multiple campuses in the same server. Generally I feel
like this will cause more long term problems with organization and
administration that it would for (server) operations unless you had a lot of
schools. As a specific case, at University of Michigan, we currently have
Dearborn and Ann Arbor Campuses in the same system (database), but Dearborn
often makes requests for specific customizations which are hard (or
impossible to make) without also applying to Ann Arbor. It might have been
easier to just have separate database instances for each school, then we
could also do updates to better accommodate each schools schedule (which is
also different). The cost of servers is cheap, and partitioning the
databases makes sense to me.

I suppose the only problems might arise if a student had classes in more
than one school in a system you were running. For that you'd be looking at
something like "Connecting Sakai and UPortal" [4] or the Sakai 3 Hybrid
project. Both of these are still pretty experimental, and all I can say is
that I know they exist. (But it's an option for the near future if you
needed that)

Q3: We have replaced the default SAKAI logo with our school logo; however,
> the relogin page displays only the left half of it as shown in the attached
> logo.png file. How can we adjust the relogin page to show the full logo?
>

I'm not sure too much about the stylesheet, but the login logo is defined in
the tool.css as


.login td.logo{
	width: 11em;
	background:#fff url(images/logo_inst.gif) 1em 1em no-repeat
}

It probably is restricted by this width? You'd probably have to make your
logo the same width or (98px) or make this larger)

Q4: The pilot system is currently running both Tomcat and DBMS on it.
> However we are planning to move DMBS to a separate server in the production
> environment. That being done, how many users can we expect the pilot system
> to serve? It has one Xeon E5420 quad-core CPU, 4GB RAM and 250GB HDD. Any
> rough estimation would be appreciated.
>

I believe we average around 1.2K-1.5K users on each quad core 16GB app
server (8GB used by tomcat) running off a separate 8-Core 128GB RAM Database
server.

https://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/PROD-2

The cpu's generally aren't very busy but there are random spikes. You'd
really want more ram or a separate database for production. For a pilot you
should be able to do a few hundred users. Those specs you posted are similar
to the specs of our older dev and qa machines. Probably some better input
from some other schools who are more hands on with production or you can
browse through some of the other production deployments on jira.


> Thanks again.
>
> Myeong
>
>
[1]
http://collab.sakaiproject.org/pipermail/sakai-user/2010-October/001508.html
[2]
https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/CONF10/Friday+-+Hierarchial+Worksites+BOF
[3] https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/SAKDEV/Hierarchy+Service
[4] https://wiki.jasig.org/display/PLT/Sakai+connector+portlet

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