An Integrated Moodle System Using VM Technology
to Achieve Higher Availability and Lower TCO
Hideo Masuda Kazuyoshi Murata
Kyoto Institute of Technology Kyoto Institute of Technology
Matsugasaki, Sakyou, Kyoto Matsugasaki, Sakyou, Kyoto
606-8585, JAPAN 606-8585, JAPAN
h-masuda@kit.ac.jp kmurata@kit.ac.jp
Yu Shibuya
Kyoto Institute of Technology
Matsugasaki, Sakyou, Kyoto
606-8585, JAPAN
shibuya@kit.ac.jp
ABSTRACT
This paper describes the methodology of the Moodle system
which we constructed using VM technology in the Center for
Information Science at KIT. Before changing to Moodle, we had
been using a Learning Management System (LMS) called
Blackboard. However, it was very costly and we could not apply
any modifications to it. Therefore, we decided to replace it.
Our requirements of the new LMS system were as follows: (a)
lower TCO including hardware and software, (b) high availability,
and (c) easy to modify the system software from the educational
and administrative point of view.
To satisfy these requirements, we made up our mind to replace
Blackboard with Moodle and to introduce virtual machine
technology. Moodle is an open-source software LMS and runs on
LAMP/LAPP (Linux, Apache, MySQL or PostgreSQL and PHP)
environment. The key ideas of our the system configurations are:
(1) use two server PCs, (2) run four web servers and two database/
NFS servers on different virtual machines, and (3) introduce
mirroring. The contents on NFS and database servers are assured
by using "lsyncd" for real time mirroring and “pgpool” for
database replication and fail over.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
C.5.5 [COMPUTER SYSTEM IMPLEMENTATION]:
Servers
General Terms
Design, Management, Experimentation.
Keywords
Moodle, LAPP, High availability, Lower TCO.
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SIGUCCS’08, October 19-22, 2008, Portland, Oregon, USA.
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315
Seigo Yasutome
Osaka Institute of Technology
Kitayama, Hirakata, Osaka
573-0196, JAPAN
yasutome@is.oit.ac.jp
Michio Nakanishi
Osaka Institute of Technology
Kitayama, Hirakata, Osaka
573-0196, JAPAN
naka@is.oit.ac.jp
1. INTRODUCTION
Recently, e-Learning systems are widely used in many
universities and companies. In 2003, we installed “Blackboard”
LMS in the Center for Information Science at Kyoto Institute of
Technology. However, only two courses were held on it for our
education consortium [1]. We asked teachers why they did not
use the LMS, and we found the following three reasons.
[P1: difficult to start using the LMS]
When a teacher wants to use our LMS, he should ask the
maintainer to create his/her course and students’ accounts for the
course. Since the maintainer is not working exclusively for the
LMS, the set-up for the course would take some time. Moreover,
there existed the problem of how to distribute the accounts (ID
and password) to the students.
[P2: poor performance]
Our LMS runs on a single PC server with Windows 2000
Server edition. There were some teachers who used our LMS for
the programming course, but the LMS went into overloaded state
when 60 students of the course logged in at a time. The system
configuration of LMS was not appropriately tuned.
[P3: lack of extensibility]
Though the Blackboard has large numbers of features for
educational tools, those are not necessarily enough for all teachers.
For example, a teacher wanted to provide dynamic learning
material such as CGI with authentication, automatic code
assessment [2] and automatic marking which are not provided by
Blackboard. Even if he implemented these features on his own
web site, some connecting features in Blackboard were required,
such as Single Sign On and variable delegation.
To cope with these problems, we decided to replace the
Blackboard LMS. In section 2, the requirements of our system are
described. In section 3 the design concepts are described. Then,
technical implementation issues are discussed in section 4. We
conclude our paper with the result and future works.
2. REQUIREMENT
2.1 Ready to use
The registration of users and classes should be automatic or
should be done at the beginning of each semester, so that every
teacher can make use of the LMS immediately whenever she/he
wants.
2.2 Lower TCO
The hardware and software configuration of the LMS should
be highly optimized and daily operation cost should be reasonable
in order to achieve less TCO (total cost of ownership).
2.3 Easy to modify
The software code of LMS can be modified when we, the
teachers of the Center, want to do so. Actually, we needed to link
the LMS to other systems in order to get course information,
namely, teachers, students, day and time of the lectures.
2.4 High availability
Once the LMS comes to be used for many courses, stopping
the service should be carefully avoided. Therefore, it should be
constructed to keep available as much as possible, in case of a
component failure.
3. BASIC DESIGN
3.1 Use Open Source Software
We decided to use “Moodle” [b] as our new LMS software.
Moodle is developed by using PHP and PostgreSQL, and runs on
LAMP/LAPP environment (Linux, Apache, MySQL / PostgreSQL
and PHP). Since all of these are open source software, not only
the initial cost becomes low, but also we can modify them as we
like.
3.2 Use Authentication Database in the Center
In the Center for Information Science of KIT, we provide
campus-wide network server services and computer rooms for
education. We use an LDAP server for basic authentication, which
has the accounts of all teachers and students [3]. So, the LMS
needs to use this LDAP service. This linkage of LMS and LDAP
would save the account distribution work. Of course, each user
only has to remember a single account stored in this basic
authentication server.
3.3 Use Databases of the Educational Affairs
Section
The LMS registers all courses and students in the database of
the educational affairs section. This will make our LMS ready to
use for teachers.
3.4 Use Virtual Machine Technology
We want to manage two LMS environments, one is in the
operation and the other is in the experimental environment to
develop the new features. For security issues, front-end (apache,
PHP) and backend (PostgreSQL) should run on separated OS
instances. A traditional solution would be to use a number of PCs
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and assign a server PC for each service. But, the rental cost and
operation cost of this naive solution would be very high.
We will adopt VM (virtual machine) technology. The VM
enables several OS instances to run on a real PC, and reduces the
total number of real PCs. Furthermore, if we want to increase the
performance of our system by adding real PCs, VM technology
can hide the hardware differences.
3.5 Use Simple Redundancy Technology
The redundancy of the LMS components is essential to
provide service when a certain component crashes. There are
clustering technologies and load balancing technologies to realize
high availability, but these technologies are very expensive and
require high skilled staff for the operation and management.
Therefore, we decide to use only a function of synchronization.
We will discuss this implementation detail in Section 4.
4. IMPLEMENTATION
Table 1. Specifications of our LMS
Server PCs IBM x3650 (2 sets)
Xeon-D5160 3.0GHz x2, 6GB memory
300GB SAS x4 (600GB, RAID1+0)
Redundant Power Supply Unit
Virtual Machine VMware Infrastructure 3 Starter Edition
Software
Backup HDD Buffalo (Japanese manufacturer)
LS-1000 (NAS, 1TB)
UPS APC SmartUPS-1500RMJ x2
KVM IP ADDER AdderLink IP
Plathome (Japanese manufacturer) PShare
4.1 Hardware Configurations
Our LMS system consists of two real server PCs that are
configured symmetrically as shown in Figure 1. This
configuration is tolerant from the hardware fault of one PC.
Moreover, each server PC has a RAID-1 (mirroring) unit and a
redundant power supply with UPS. On each server PC, we run
VMware Infrastructure [a] instead of Xen [c]. According to our
basic design described in Section 3, Xen, an open source virtual
machine software, may be preferable than VMware, but no
companies could support Xen system at that time of bid of our
new system. We operate a web server and a database server as the
guest OS on VMware. Because each server PC is equipped with
two dual-core CPUs, we estimate that each PC can run up to four
guest OSs. Moreover, it is not so difficult to replace a server PC
with other PC because OS environment is isolated from hardware
components by VMware.
 Figure 1 : Configuration of our LMS
4.2 Operating Systems
We use CentOS [d] as the guest operating system. CentOS is
an enterprise-class Linux distribution derived from sources freely
provided to the public by RedHat. CentOS conforms fully to the
upstream vendors redistribution policy and aims to be 100%
binary compatible. Four web servers and two database/NFS
servers run on different virtual machines as shown in Figure 1.
This enables us to isolate outgoing web service and inner database
service.
The four web servers are symmetric configuration and must
serve the same contents such as uploaded files via Moodle. It
requires shared storage, so the database server also acts as an NFS
server. The difference between a web server and a database server
is whether the server has the user data installed. Therefore, we
separate the user data into isolated disk partition (/export), and the
other part that affects OS operation is common to all guest OSs.
The size of the common part is 25 GB, and the size of user data is
300 GB. By communizing all guest OS images, they can be
updated in the same way, so we do not care the difference of Web
server and database server for updating and duplicating.
4.3 Redundancy of Web services
Moodle uses cookies for tracing the user. In addition, for
multiplexing web servers, Moodle has methodology that passes a
cookie’s information to the database. Therefore, we can
implement load balancing of web servers using DNS round robin
function, instead of using an expensive load balancer appliance.
In a precise sense DNS round robin can not balance the load
completely, but our system avoids SPF (single point of failure).
Our system consists of total four web servers (two servers in
each real server PC). This achieves fault tolerance from one guest
OS failure or from one real server PC’s crash.
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4.4 Data Replications
The hard disk of the database server is RAID1, so the failure
of a single hard disk drive will not affect database service.
However, if the guest OS on which database server runs stops,
whole Moodle system cannot continue. To avoid this situation, we
prepared two database servers and usually only use one. The other
database is synchronized and is a stand by.
For file service, the data files on NFS servers are
synchronized by "lsyncd", which is a simple replication tool based
on "rsync". Therefore, we can easily operate and diagnose this
file system. For database service, two database servers are
synchronized by "pgpool", which is also a simple replication tool
for PostgreSQL. If pgpool fails, the system operator can continue
the database service by disabling pgpool and switching to
postgresql.
4.5 User Authentication
The basic authentication server in the Center keeps the
account of all students and teachers. Since we found some
attributes of LDAP is not compatible with Moodle, we modified
the LDAP authentication module of Moodle to automatically
generate necessary fields for Moodle from one or more LDAP
attributes.
4.6 Course Creation Policy
The educational affairs section of KIT manages two master
datasets; one is the course dataset which contains course name,
date, time, and teacher name. The other is a student dataset in
which courses of each student are recorded. We thought it would
be risky to directly connect these datasets with our LMS, so we
use an intermediate data file; the datasets are converted to CSV
format and are put in the specific directory of LMS system by our
software, then the CSV file is read by Moodle in order to reflect
the changed data.
4.7 Co-operation with Other System
Assume the situation where program source code which a
student has just uploaded into Moodle should be checked right
away for a programming course. This could be achieved by
writing such a module for Moodle, however, it would be much
better to use other web servers for source code checking from the
view point of system load.
Moodle can generate GET method with parameters in link
resource module. The parameters are inside values in Moodle. It
is very weak for the authentication delegation because secret data
value of Moodle is hashed in “md5 (PASSPHRASE + IPaddress)”,
i.e. users using proxy can easily replay attack.
Therefore we developed a module that secret information can
be generated flexible by teacher, for example, teacher generates a
file resource which contains the keyword like
“%%MOODLE_ENCRYPTEDCODE_PARAMS = userusername,
remoteaddr%%”, then the module replaces above keyword by
“md5(PASSPHRASE + userusername + remoteaddr)”. This value
can not be used to replay attack by other user. By doing this, safer
authentication cooperation is constructed.
Moreover, we are developing the SNMP pull module for [4].
It will get the information from client PC via SNMP when user on
client PC requests the evaluation.
5. LESSON LEARNED
5.1 1600 courses in Moodle
There are about 1,600 courses in KIT in 2008, and all of
them have been registered in Moodle before the start of this
semester. At the beginning of the semester the database server has
experienced an overloaded state. This is because Moodle
generates a course list every time when each user logs in, and this
task is quite heavy. This predicament was not observed when
only a few dozen courses were registered. We have solved this
problem by increasing the working memory size of the database.
5.2 Single course with multiple course codes
We found that some courses have multiple course IDs for a
single course. The course is actually held in one classroom, but it
has an ID for one department and another ID for another
department during the curriculum transitional period. This
scenario may occur in other universities. We treated those
exceptional courses as “meta course” of Moodle, but it requires
manual intervention. We will discuss to assign a new ID such
courses with educational affairs section.
6. CONCLUSIONS
In this paper, our Moodle system configuration based on
Virtual Machine technology is shown. The system utilizes user
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authentication and course information provided by other system,
and attained low-cost operation that would be higher for the
previous Blackboard system.
We did not introduce the technologies such as clustering and
load balancer. This is because these technologies require advanced
technical skill, which would take too much time for our technical
staff to master.
The future tasks are to scale the system by sharing further the
database load in order to support more users at a time, to enhance
software modules for supporting lecture-based classes, and to
study how to enable students to access our LMS from their cell
phones.
7. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors thank Mr. M. Takeuchi in Mitani Corporation Japan.
This research was supported in part by Grant-in-Aid for Education
and Research, Kyoto Institute of Technology and Grant-in-Aid for
Scientific Research (No.19500069), Ministry of Education,
Science and Culture, Japan.
8. RESOURCES
[a] VMware http://www.vmware.com/
[b] Moodle http://www.moodle.org/
[c] Xen http://www.xensource.com/
[d] CentOS: The Community ENTerprise Operating System
http://www.centos.org/
[e] lsyncd - Live Syncing Daemon
http://www.pri.univie.ac.at/index.php?c=show&CE
WebS_what=Lsyncd
[f] pgpool http://pgpool.projects.postgresql.org/pgpool-ja.html
9. REFERENCES
[1] Consortium of education for engineering related universities,
IT council News letter, No.1, 3.1 (2003) (in Japanese).
[2] A. Nunome, M. Fukuzawa and H. Hirata. Development of an
E-learning Back-end System for Code Assessment in
Programming Practice, IPSJ 2008-05-ICM-11 (2008) (in
Japanese).
[3] H. Masuda, K. Murata and Y. Shibuya. The implementation
of integrated Moodle pilot system on KIT with low cost and
high availability, IPSJ 2008-05-ICM-12 (2008) (in Japanese).
[4] H. Masuda, M. Nakanishi and S. Yasutome. Hands-on
Training Course for Server Setup and Operations using
Diskless Computer System, ITHET2007 (2007).