[Building Sakai] BigBlueButton multiple meetings

[Fred Dixon]

  Hi Adrian,

For the benefit of others, I'm Fred Dixon, one of the developers of 
BigBlueButton and the CEO of Blindside Networks, the company that 
started the BigBlueButton project in 2007.   We've been working on 
BigBlueButton for almost three years, it's been awesome to see it's 
growth, and we've got big plans for 2011 (including adding record and 
playback).

Blindside Networks also provides commercial support for BigBlueButton to 
universities and colleges, so we see a lot of deployments.

What we see is that an institution typically starts with a single 
BigBlueButton server and uses it for trial with one or two courses.  If 
the trials go well, the number of simultaneous on-line classes will 
grow, and, at some point, depending on the capacity of their server, 
they want to add a second BigBlueButton server.

At this point, they start to have questions, such as

1.  How to effectively load balance between the back-end BigBlueButton 
servers
2.  How do I monitor and upgrade my BigBlueButton servers
3.  How do I manage all my recordings created on the BigBlueButton 
servers (we can see this question coming as we release record and playback)

To solve this problem, and to generate revenue to support our 
development of BigBlueButton, Blindside Networks is developing a 
Deployment Server that will manage multiple BigBlueButton servers.  This 
server will address all the above issues (and more) so that going from a 
single BigBlueButton server to multiple BigBlueButton servers will be 
easy and seamless.  This will be a commercially supported product from 
Blindside Networks (separate from the BigBlueButton open source project).

It's great if the Sakai project wants to add support for multiple 
servers within the tool itself, but I can share with you we'll be 
providing a solution to scale beyond a single BigBlueButton servers as 
part of our product and service offering.

If anyone would like more information, feel free to contact me directly.

Regards,... Fred

> You're right. The way to go about this IMHO would be to have one tool
> balancing requests to a cluster of BBB hosts, using the total meetings
> on each as a basic measure of their current load. More sophisticated
> metrics could be added later. We're adding a node to our current BBB
> machine so we'll implement and test this.
>
> Here's a JIRA for it:
>
> https://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/BBB-59
>
> Cheers,
>
> Adrian