#1 2011-04-14 10:34:59

**_tyson.brown_**

A shotgun blast of questions from a soon-to-be service admin..

Hi all,

My institution currently has an install of Connect 7.0, we are looking at upgrading to 8 and it looks like yours truly will likely wind up being the service administrator (I won't likely be the SERVER admin, managing the actual/virtual hardware, NOR will I be the database administrator... we have other people for those jobs).  And I don't have a whole lot of experience with ANY of those jobs, so go gentle!  :).  I thought I would post these questions here before I moved on to asking them of Adobe Platinum Support (what my managers want me to do, since we're PAYING for that)...  At least that way I'll hopefully get some real-life examples of what people are doing...

Question 1 - We are currently running 60 concurrent seat licenses, which would work alright to integrate with our Blackboard Learn installation via the integration building block.  However, I understand that the concurrent seat licensing model does NOT support reserving/guaranteeing seats, something our instructors are pretty keen on if they want to use it for a class.  Our Adobe Sales reps have suggested moving to a Named Organizer licensing model so that we have 90 of those, each with 99 reserved seats... However, WILL this model work with Blackboard integration?

Question 2 - We are currently integrated with Active Directory for authentication and access control of our 60 concurrent seats... With our move to 8, we're hoping to change our integration to a combination of CAS for authentication and OpenLDAP for access control.  I note in reading the upgrade guide for 8 that they indicate compatibility with OpenLDAP, a version OLDER than what we have, so I'm guessing that's okay... What have people found/done at their institutions?

Question 3 - Will the above OpenLDAP integration/CAS integration work with the Named Organizer license model?

Question 4- Virtual Machines?  I did read in the docs that VMs are supported in Connect 8... Experiences?  Good?  Bad? Suggestions or guidelines from practical experience?

I suspect at least half of these questions have been asked somewhere on here before, so I apologize for the noob questioning and I'm fine if you want to just point me to a previous post...  I'm just a bit short of time as our licenses come up for renewal in May and my managers want answers before then...

Thanx in advance...

Tyson Brown

**_Jorma_at_RealEyes_**

Re: A shotgun blast of questions from a soon-to-be service admin..

Tyson,

I can get a couple of your questions and bump this up for you.

1. Connect doesn't do a "reserved seat" licensing. The licensing is either for individuals to attend meetings or for individuals to host meetings. The seats in either model are first come, first serve. The different models just fit different usage/needs.

3. Yes, the LDAP integration is not limited to a licensing model.

**_TrevorMartin_**

Re: A shotgun blast of questions from a soon-to-be service admin..

Question 4: I use two VM's via VMWare vCenter for our Connect servers. VMs actually work much better than physical machines due to easy resource allocation and fast boot times. The primary factor is network throughput. I highly recommend having one of the network adapters on your host be dedicated to the Connect VM. I have both Connect VMs running on the same host that has 4 ethernet ports. Two of those ports are dedicated to Connect. The third is for every other VM and the fourth isn't used yet. Perhaps the best benefit is that VMs are incredibly easy to backup for a disaster recovery plan.

**_wsipc-mike_**

Re: A shotgun blast of questions from a soon-to-be service admin..

I 2nd this. Though we have our Connect 8 server installed on a physical server, we have a Connect 8 dev server running on a XenCenter VM and it works great.

Question 4: I use two VM's via VMWare vCenter for our Connect servers. VMs actually work much better than physical machines due to easy resource allocation and fast boot times. The primary factor is network throughput. I highly recommend having one of the network adapters on your host be dedicated to the Connect VM. I have both Connect VMs running on the same host that has 4 ethernet ports. Two of those ports are dedicated to Connect. The third is for every other VM and the fourth isn't used yet. Perhaps the best benefit is that VMs are incredibly easy to backup for a disaster recovery plan.