Jasigsakai12 UPortal 4 in Action

uPortal 4.
0 in
Action
Oakland University
Lori Tirpak & Aaron Grant
June 10-15, 2012

Growing Community;
Growing Possibilities
Introduction
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
Environment
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
Integrated Services
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
Hardware
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
OU MySail Key Features
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
OU MySail Key Features -2
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
Jasig Portlets
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
uPortal 4.0Implementation
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

10
Tips for upgrading to uPortal 4.0
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
11
More Tips
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.
12
Progress to Degree portlet
13
14
Demo
https://mysail.oakland.edu
15
MySail Using uPortal 4.0
16
17
18
19
20
MySail on a Mobile Web Browser
21
MySail using uMobile App

1.1
22
uPortal 4 in
Action
UW-Madison
Jim Helwig
June 10-15, 2012

Growing Community;
Growing Possibilities
Infrastructure
24
System Overview
5 clustered Solaris servers
uPortal 4.0.5, Tomcat, Apache httpd
Oracle portal database
Nortel Alteon Layer 4 load balancing
25
Change Management
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
26
Attributes and Groups
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
27
Virtual Portals
28
One System, Multiple

Portals
Single, clustered portal application

Three domains
mycourseguide.wisc.edu
my.wisc.edu
my.wisconsin.edu
29
mycourseguide.wisc.edu
Publicly accessible curricular guide
View differs, depending on whether or not
you are authenticated
30
my.wisc.edu
UW-Madison campus portal
80,000+ faculty, staff, students, applicants
31
my.wisconsin.edu
UW System wide portal for 13 campuses
Campus-specific skins
32
User Interface
33
Subject-based Tabs
34
User Customizable
Add, remove, move content
Add tabs
35
Desktop View
36
Mobile View
37
Content
38
80+ Portlets
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
39
Simple Content
Management
40
IFrame
41
XML Transform
42
Dynamic Menu
43
WebProxy
44
Bookmarks, Weather and Courses
45
Custom Portlets
46
47
48
49
Questions?
50

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uPortal 4.

June 10-15, 2012

Oakland University is located in Rochester, Michigan

We have approximately 20,000 students

We have been running a Portal environment for 5 years and

We were running uPortal 3.1.1 before upgrading to 4.0.2

We have 2 full time staff members and 4 student employees

We have only focused on student experience

2012 Jasig Sakai Conference

Jasig uPortal 4.0.2 (soon to be 4.0.5)

2012 Jasig Sakai Conference

2012 Jasig Sakai Conference

uPortal Database Servers

2012 Jasig Sakai Conference

OU MySail Key Features

LDAP and Banner group configurations

Progress to Degree portlet

Academic Information portlet

Class schedule portlet

OU MySail Key Features -2

LDAP Password Information portlet

Groovy build process

CAS single sign

Oakland University Google custom search engine integrated

2012 Jasig Sakai Conference

2012 Jasig Sakai Conference

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

We implemented Groovy Build process which helps with rapid

We created Quickstart data to help streamline the Portal build process

Tips for upgrading to uPortal 4.0

Load test. Load is higher than prior versions.

Have a minimum of 4 gb for heap space. We were

Reduce logging levels to info or warn. Some portlets come

We fine tuned our PostgreSQL database to optimize our uPortal

We deactivated uPortal event tracking. This was putting a high

We had to change code on OU and Jasig portlets to catch and

We doubled physical memory on front ends and database

With uPortal 4.0.5 and our additional portlets we found a

2012 Jasig Sakai Conference

Progress to Degree portlet

2012 Jasig Sakai Conference

2012 Jasig Sakai Conference

2012 Jasig Sakai Conference

MySail Using uPortal 4.0

2012 Jasig Sakai Conference

2012 Jasig Sakai Conference

2012 Jasig Sakai Conference

2012 Jasig Sakai Conference

2012 Jasig Sakai Conference

MySail on a Mobile Web Browser

2012 Jasig Sakai Conference

MySail using uMobile App

2012 Jasig Sakai Conference

June 10-15, 2012

2012 Jasig Sakai Conference

2012 Jasig Sakai Conference

Pre-dev framework testing

Jenkins, Perl, shell scripts for deployment

2012 Jasig Sakai Conference

Attributes and Groups

2012 Jasig Sakai Conference

2012 Jasig Sakai Conference

One System, Multiple