uPortal 4 in Action

Lori Tirpak & Aaron Grant

June 10-15, 2012

Growing Community;
Growing Possibilities

 Oakland University is located in Rochester, Michigan

 We have approximately 20,000 students

 We have been running a Portal environment for 5 years and
converted to Jasig uPortal in 2009

 We were running uPortal 3.1.1 before upgrading to 4.0.2

 We have 2 full time staff members and 4 student employees
dedicated to uPortal, CAS, uMobile and portlet development

 We have only focused on student experience

 Staff and faculty can log in but there are limited predefined
features

2012 Jasig Sakai Conference 2

 Jasig uPortal 4.0.2 (soon to be 4.0.5)
 Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.0
 Apache Tomcat 6.0.35
 Oracle JDK 1.6.30
 Groovy 8.4
 PostgreSQL 8.4
 Maven 3.0.3
 Ant 1.8.2


◦ LDAP - Red Hat Directory Server

◦ CAS (Central Authentication Service) 3.4.8

◦ Ellucian (formerly SunGard HE) Banner

◦ F5 BIG-IP 3900 using Local Traffic Manager
Used for Load Balancing, SSL Termination, Port
Redirection


uPortal Web Servers
◦ 2 Nodes - 50/50 Load Balanced
 Dell Poweredge R610
 Two Quad Core Xeon Processors
 Processor, X5550, 2.66/6.4, 8mb L1 Cache Intel Dual
Socket Nehalem
 24 gb of RAM
uPortal Database Servers
◦ 2 Nodes - Primary and Failover
 Dell Poweredge R610
 Two Quad Core Xeon Processors
 Processor, X5550, 2.66/6.4, 8mb L1 Cache Intel Dual
Socket Nehalem
 24 gb of RAM


 LDAP and Banner group configurations
◦ This allows us to target specific groups of users with Tabs and
portlets

 Progress to Degree portlet
◦ Displays academic courses needed to complete degree

 Grades portlet
◦ Displays to student midterm and final grades

 Academic Information portlet
◦ List of student ID, Major, Advising info

 Class schedule portlet
◦ List of courses a student is registered for along with a link to
OU Bookstore to purchase required text books


 LDAP Password Information portlet
◦ Password age, best practices and link to reset password.

 Groovy build process
◦ Rapid deployment of uPortal, Puppetmaster script that runs
Maven and Ant commands

 CAS single sign
◦ Google apps for education, Moodle, Org Sync, Symplicity
NACELINK, Blackboard Xythos, National Student Clearinghouse

 Oakland University Google custom search engine integrated into
Jasig Search portlet


 Announcements
 Feedback
 Calendar
 Campus Map
 Bookmarks
 Weather
 Simple CMS portlet
 News Reader RSS
 Jasig widget portlets (uPortal tips, sitemap, Google
map, Google search, etc)
 Search


 Drew Wills and Jacob Lichner from Unicon worked with us to re-skin
uPortal 4.0.

 Drew worked with us to migrate our uPortal from 3.1 to 4.0.

 We decided to start from scratch on student layouts. We deleted all
database content.

 We moved from SVN to GitHub for our source code repository.
Using GitHub has improved our upgrade process to include patches
from the latest Jasig releases

 We implemented Groovy Build process which helps with rapid
deployment of uPortal. Puppetmaster script runs Maven and Ant
commands

 We created Quickstart data to help streamline the Portal build
process


 Load test. Load is higher than prior versions.

 Use initportal on the first node and then deploy-ear on all other
nodes. We had layout issues with our tabs because we used
initportal on all nodes.

 Have a minimum of 4 gb for heap space. We were experiencing
Tomcat crashes and Tomcat 500 errors.

 Reduce logging levels to info or warn. Some portlets come with
logging levels of debug or trace and this caused a lot of RAM
usage and IO on disk.

 We fine tuned our PostgreSQL database to optimize our uPortal
performance


 We deactivated uPortal event tracking. This was putting a high
load on front ends and database server and utilizing 50% of our
switch traffic. 500 mb per second.

 We had to change code on OU and Jasig portlets to catch and not
display 503 errors.

 We doubled physical memory on front ends and database server
from 12 to 24 gb

 With uPortal 4.0.5 and our additional portlets we found a
need to increase the amount of files that could be opened at
once in the OS, the default for Red Hat Enterprise Linux was
1024, we increased this to 2048.


https://mysail.oakland.edu


Jim Helwig

June 10-15, 2012

Growing Community;
Growing Possibilities

 5 clustered Solaris servers
 uPortal 4.0.5, Tomcat, Apache httpd
 Oracle portal database
 Nortel Alteon Layer 4 load balancing


 CVS - legacy portlets
 SVN - new portlets, configuration files
 GitHub - uPortal framework

 Pre-dev – framework testing
 Shared dev – some portlet development
 Test – integration testing
 QA – deployment validation, customer testing
 Production

 Jenkins, Perl, shell scripts for deployment
 jMeter for load testing


 Attribute sources
◦ Shibboleth
◦ LDAP
◦ various other databases
 Group sources
◦ PAGS groups based on attributes for major
populations and enterprise roles
◦ Local group store for administrative groups
◦ External custom group database for fine grained,
manually managed groups
◦ Likely to use Grouper in the future


 Single, clustered portal application
 Three domains


 Publicly accessible curricular guide
 View differs, depending on whether or not
you are authenticated


 UW-Madison campus portal
 80,000+ faculty, staff, students, applicants


 UW System wide portal for 13 campuses
 Campus-specific skins


 Add, remove, move content
 Add tabs


 Focused on personalized content
 Aggregation of campus applications

 Simple Content Management
 IFrame
 XML Transform
 Dynamic Menu
 WebProxy
 Jasig Bookmarks, Weather and Courses
 And many custom portlets


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