I recently was able to build a "perfect" clone of our machine that we use to power the e-learning Institute's course infrastructure. Years and years of trial and error, success and failure have led to this point. This will work almost "out of the box" for those at Penn State but with minor configuration changes it will work for anyone running a Virtual Machine architecture. The clone includes:
- Ready integration w/ Angel (if you process the request from them to allow the box to communicate with it)
- Webaccess integration ready
- All content / users / settings the default version we would run off of if I "lost all data" from our courses today
- DB / Webserver on one VM (our setup is 2 but just for scalability, no reason you can't move to that or other configurations from this)
- 1 central database for controlling / running the architecture w/ Course Manager and every other module under the son configured and running
- 1 "default" database that's been setup to run outline designer and menu blocks out of the box
It also comes with all the roles (11 in all I believe) configured correctly and all modules activated / installed. This is exactly what we're running and I've finally been able to get around to making it happen with a lot of help from John and the folks at VMhost.
Want one? Contact me and let me know if your interested and we'll try to set something up. VMhost does a great job of getting boxes up running what we run (esp. if it's just a clone) and allows you to set them up for as little or long as you like (so you could throw one up for a month just to give it a try and see if it's something you want to do). No risk trial in that way :0). This also has rubric, assignment studio, and one of the latest builds of the network manager running :).