Moving to Moodle 2.0: Pt.1 The Decision

It wasn’t easy and came with a lot of inves­ti­ga­tion, thought and dis­cus­sions, but we’ve decided to make the move to Moo­dle 2.0 this sum­mer (2011).

We have had a num­ber of our teach­ers, stu­dents and tech staff play­ing with Moo­dle in a sand­box envi­ron­ment for the past few months.  We signed up for a course (Moo­dle Pathfind­ers with remote-learner.net) to learn more and even met with edu­ca­tors from other schools to talk about their expe­ri­ences (includ­ing @peterkrich) and while there are some con­cerns as we make the move, we are confident.

We have been using Moo­dle for about 4 or 5 years (time blurs) and it is an inte­gral part of our school.  In “Moo­dle: How big is big?” I have detailed the size of our install, but in short we have roughly 1800 users and over 1200 courses in the sys­tem.  We have been a self-hosting school the entire time and the while we have con­sid­ered remote-hosting the size of our install makes it cost pro­hib­i­tive (annual esti­mates have been roughly $10K).

One of the issues that we are deal­ing with on the tech­ni­cal side is that our sup­port. Our sup­port com­pany has not yet announced their time­line for mov­ing their clients to 2.0 and because of that fact we have taken on the bur­den of migrat­ing our install from 1.9.5 to 2.0.3.

Com­pli­cat­ing mat­ters is the fact that we are installing on new hard­ware and a new OS; mov­ing from a Linux Cen­tOS rack mount server to an Apple Snow Leop­ard server on a MacMini.  While we’ve been very happy with our cur­rent Linux server, we don’t have much expe­ri­ence sup­port­ing Linux within our envi­ron­ment and want to be able to do a bet­ter job of man­ag­ing the server, back­ups and upgrades.

What will come in the fol­low­ing posts is a detailed descrip­tion of the steps we’ve taken to make this move, includ­ing: infor­ma­tion on the hard­ware we are mov­ing to, the steps taken to pre­pare that hard­ware for Moo­dle, the actual migra­tion process and the steps taken once the moves have been made to opti­mize performance.

A spe­cial note and thanks to Damien Bar­rett (@damienbarrett - http://appletechnician.com/), with whom I work, for all of his help and effort with this project.  While Damien and I have a good under­stand­ing of the Apple OS we are by no means MySQL/PHP pro­gramers and it is through a good deal of trial and error, not to men­tion a cer­tain degree of “Google-foo” that we have been able to do all of this.

Stay tuned there’s more to come…