By neofactor on

I use drupal personally and professionally, but at our University (www.uncc.edu) ... we are looking for a central WCS solution that we can centrally maintain (by ITS) for multiple colleges/departments/students/users.

The thing I struggle with is not the power of drupal on a site by site departmental basis but rather how a central ITS group can easily manage over +300 individual websites.

These kinds of numbers scare me when I look at how drupal currently performs updates. I could certainly share a code source base, share selected contributed modules, but to push updates out to +300 sites... that is daunting.

I feel drupal is the strongest when you have it installed on a departmental site with staff who can customize and develop meeting the specific needs of their group.

I know of at least one department in our University that manages many drupal sites, but the ratio is not nearly the same as what I am facing.

Please give me your thoughts on Drupal NOT just for a department by department install but hundreds of them across an ENTIRE University.

Thanks for your help.

David

Comments

boris mann’s picture

boris mann commented

This is a challenge with any system. There are many many many different ways you could "solve" this problem. One is to look at the Domain Access module -- it uses one Drupal site (e.g. one database / user system) but monkeys around with incoming hosts so you can have many different domains pointing at it and have different content on different domains.

Another is a solution we're working on called Aegir (used to be called Hostmaster). See http://groups.drupal.org/aegir for more details. In a nutshell, it's a framework for mass hosting 100s or 1000s of Drupal sites.

Everything else is going to be policy and procedure. Do you standardize on an install profile / supported set of modules? Do all sites/departments/etc. all upgrade at the same time? What is your user login / single sign on needs?

Acquia might be interested in selling you a support contract which would take some of the load of your internal departments -- and also give you a "standard" set of modules to support.

Hope that helps. This is definitely doable, but it's going to take the time and effort that ANY large scale solution would take.

--
The future is Bryght at Raincity Studios

Mtt-2’s picture

Mtt-2 commented

Hi,

As I am facing the exact same issue (thus not for university purposes) I would love to hear from experienced players as well. As I figured out the number of sites is not the issue as you can share easily one drupal install for 300 or more sites using the "sites" folder.

Upgrading all 300 sites is just as easy as upgrading one drupal install I would think (but, again, I did not experiencedmore than 40 siites in one install)

My only issue is about modules. If one of your 300 sites need one precise module that is not upgraded then this site among the 300 will freeze the upgrading. You have two choice from this : wait for upgrading in case of a contributed module or upgrade it by yourself. Is there any other solution ?

Thanks for sharing experience,

Matt

neofactor’s picture

neofactor commented

With Sites.. sharing core code was possible... but the database is in fact separate... even if you share the same DB you have to pre-pend the tables to make them unique.... which is the same as having separate ones for upgrade process. When you have multiple domains under site.. each one needs to be called via the /update.php to perform the needed updates per site. +300 sites is not fun.

As for your modules question.... that is were you have to standardize and stick to it. If you let one site have their OWN pool of different modules.. you basically need to fork the groups and have separate common pools with different features. That is where things can get ugly. We would not allow special add on modules.. only approved ones we have tested. Otherwise you may NEVER be able to upgrade without waiting on some contrib module.

Contrib modules scare me... I have been burned in thee past... CORE is not everything you need though so you have to gamble.

I will look into the module for multiple management. Thanks for the heads up. How to updates work with it?

David McIntosh