Gary Day

Virtualising Virtual Environments

Before the education section of this site expands..
I would like to make my perspective on a particular concept clear.

When I refer to a “Virtual Learning Environment” I no longer refer to a single application such as Moodle or Blackboard. I am referring to a collection of services and/or applications, for example “my” Virtual Learning Environment would consist of a Course Management System, an ePortfolio system/solution, my shared file/object repository, student email and remotely accessible storage facility and even my authentication server for accessing external resources as with Federated Access Management.

The reason for my adopting this way of thinking is that the Virtual Learning Environment is (and will continue to do so, increasingly) moving away from the realms of the IT Lecturer’s Pet Project, not to belittle the efforts of the IT Lecturer, after all, the roots of the Virtual Learning Environment will always belong with the student/teacher relationship but the increasing time, security and scalability concerns are no longer things that can be addressed in anyone’s “spare time”.

Let me talk about my Road To Realisation.

I was informed some while ago, by our eLearning Co-ordinator that there was a need for additional services to be added to our Virtual Learning Environment (during this conversation Virtual Learning Environment = Moodle, and only Moodle). Now under conventional infrastructure practices this would require the purchase of additional hardware, memory, servers, storage etc and placing it in a rack (and booking the tech-time for someone to do this) in a small server room - note: not a vast gleaming data centre, this is a College Of Further Education.
Traditionally this would be the form every time I was asked to provide a new service.

Several months ago I was involved with moving along the implementation of a new Staff Extranet and the subject of server virtualisation/consolidation was raised, every time IT Support added a new system, new hardware was added to provide and support it, this couldn’t continue was the view held, it was expensive, time consuming and frankly everyone would very soon run out of space and everything would just grind to a halt. The general view was, yes, virtualisation and/or consolidation was the way forward, but not yet, not in the required timescale. Fair enough. A reasonable view.

Traditional services were wheeled in to support the project.
It was a decision that had to be made.

Now, the time has come to rebuild our Virtual Learning Environment, to add new services and solutions.
There’s no better time with the Summer Break slowly creeping up on us (your Summer Break, not mine by the way, do you think that elves take a break from shoe making to flex their Linux Sysadmin skills during the night?) to start devising a long term virtualisation/consolidation strategy complete with automated fail-over, full system/service backups, the ability to add and/or replace services with an absolute minimum of downtime.. not to mention and increased efficiency in terms of the environment and system management issues.

Take a look at your Virtual Learning Environment.
Have you given it stupid amounts of memory and not enough storage?
Does Moodle have a Dual/Quad-Core Processor all to itself?
How long are you keeping your student data?
Are you prepared for that time to become a whole lot longer than you expected?