Main.Web 2.0
Project Description
Main.Web is a mission critical webserver - its primary function is to host the main university website: www.uoguelph.ca. Originally provisioned to provide dedicated resources for the main website, this service is now dated and is ready for re-investment.
The goal of this project is to update and improve the main.web service, so that it will be better resourced and more resilient making it better able to meet the needs of the service. The following are the objectives of this project:
- Migrate the main.web content to VMWare servers which follow our current web server deployment pattern
- Provide a deployment pattern that will allow us to easily and quickly add horizontal scaling to respond to sudden traffic loads
- Provide a deployment pattern that will integrate easily with a proxy cache service, such as Apache mod_cache to increase the service capacity
- Move file storage from local drives to NFS mounted on files.web
- Ensure SSL is able to be smoothly transitioned to the new servers
- Provide a dedicated server for the main web site content and a CPA owned content server for less critical content. This will help both departments better manage the critical-priority content of the main web site.
- Formalize the SLA between WSC and CPA for our webhosting relationship
- Resolve server-side issues for long-standing technical issues through the hardware and OS refresh (especially including a known *truncated files* issue)
Project Timeline
Updated: January - March 2012