I have been looking into implementing a load balanced solution for our
blackboard 7.1 service. I have looked into hardware solutions which
blackboard support/recommend such as the F5 BIG IP but considering that
for resilence ideally an active/passive set up of these would be required,
it seems an expensive solution. Therefore, I have been investigating using
isa server 2006 and its web farm service which seems to work extremely
well with blackboard in a test enivronment set up here. As well as
possible cost savings in this solution there is also the Single Sign On
functionality which would also be extremely useful if this did work with
blackboard. Given that blackboard don't seem to support software load
balancing solutions I would be very interested to hear comments from
anyone who is using or has tried using isa server in their blackboard
environment for load balancing or even SSO.
Any help including other load balancing recommendations or SSO solutions
gratefully received!
Many thanks,
Peter Langley
Swansea University
|