[Setup] "Perfect" setup for a Business School?

Cedric Gaspoz cedric.gaspoz at unil.ch
Fri Nov 6 22:14:39 UTC 2009


Hi,
I'm new to this mailing-list as well as to the Zope/Plone world, even if
I made some python during the last years.

I'm currently in charge of the redesign of the internet/intranet
infrastructure of our Business School.

Currently, we are running all of our web services on two servers. The
first one run Apache and MySQL, serving static and PHP pages, as well as
proxying our Zope/Plone instances running on the second server. The
second server run 4 instances of Zope/Plone, each with different Plone
Sites (one instance for the main site, one for the department sites, one
for the programs site and the last one for various sites and the
intranet). Each instance has it's own zodb.

Some stats: 2Mio hits/day, 0.5Mio pages/day and 35K visits/day.

I'm not the guy who designed this setup 5 years ago, but as I
understand, and as I found using this setup, splitting the websites into
different instances is not scalable (no load balancing, just a
"thematic" balancing) and painful to update (as every website is a Plone
site in the root of the instances, I have to made X times the same
corrections when updating a template...). Furthermore, the hardware is
now outdated as well as the operating system and the Plone version
(2.0.5).

So I'm looking for the best design setup given our requirements and the
actual state-of-the-art. I will have enough money to acquire 5 servers
for the new setup. They will all be connected to the SAN.

I'm thinking of one server running ZEO and MySQL (needed for intranet
applications and PHP websites), two servers running X instances of Zope
with the websites running on all instances and 1 or two servers in front
with Apache (for both Zope/Plone and static/dynamic websites) and some
caching/load balancing software.

Have you advices setup propositions, ...

Thanks for your help
Cédric




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