On Apr 27, 2011, at 2:33 PM, Marvin Addison wrote: > Question remains: would anyone deploy a VM appliance to their > production architecture? Please, please, speak up if you're willing > and under what conditions.
For the love of all that is good in the world, yes! There are a lot of smart folks on this list, who work in shops with dedicated infrastructure teams, or who have ninja-level Java application development/deployment skills. I think you guys are awesome, and I've probably bought you many a beer at conferences and meet-ups, while I ask seemingly inane questions :-) I'm from a small school, with a small shop. In my experience, a small team in a heterogenous environment can't afford to have (or maintain) the depth of knowledge it takes to config, deploy, and maintain complex apps like CAS from the source and bare metal. When even your programmers take support calls in the field, you can run out of hours in a day pretty quickly. If there were some well documented, easy to setup CAS VMs that covered common use cases, I'd use them in a heartbeat, for both testing and production. I'd probably have _fewer_ security concerns with a publicly-vetted config over my own. Heck, I wouldn't mind replacing our uPortal server with a generic virtual appliance. I'd love to just pick the flavor of VM(s) closest to my scenario (standalone, LDAP, Services Manager, Distributed Ticket Registry, etc.)., provide some details, point it at a database, and maybe a theme to load, then deploy. I don't care about the OS, the architecture, etc.; I'd never even look at it as server to support, just a service. Other than security patching, it'll go months or years without getting dedicated staff eyes on it again. I appreciate how little I probably understand the massive amount of work it would take to develop production-quality generic CAS appliances, for even the simplest configuration scenarios. Also, I'm wary of putting too much stock in my own opinion, as I'm just one voice. However, I'm equally wary of the responses on a list where the most active participants are not the target audience. Jasig projects, and community source movement in general would probably benefit from lower costs of entry and maintenance. That's not a dig, just a thought. -Aaron --------------------------------- Aaron Fuleki Senior Web Architect Denison University 740.587.5752 --------------------------------- -- You are currently subscribed to [email protected] as: [email protected] To unsubscribe, change settings or access archives, see http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/JSG/cas-user
