Blackboard Downtime 5/20-5/27 What we are doing

We wanted to give you some specifics of what we will be doing during our downtime. By now, you know that we plan to move from Blackboard 7.3 to Blackboard 8.0. You also know that we will be performing some other systems changes. Here are just a few:

• a series of bug patch, security, and general feature set enhancement upgrades on the Blackboard hosting servers
• Application servers will be finalized in order to provide their complete functionality for all Blackboard Application feature sets as per specification for the planned Blackboard implementation.
• we will be implementing the Conga Clustering technology through the Red Hat Cluster Suite in order to allow high availability for the BlackBoard cluster such that in the event and one node were to experience potential problems the Cluster Suite would be able to detect the issue, take the problematic node out of the active cluster, retask it as passive or if need be decommission the node and alert the administrator on duty or on call.
• we will be placing all the BlackBoard Cluster nodes symbolically behind a load balancing configuration for transparent pass through of the F5 devices that will be able to offload newly created concurrent sessions to the BlackBoard node that is momentarily under the lesser load of all those in which are members of the cluster.

We will keep you informed along the way!

Thanks,
Jacob Spradlin
Technology Support Coordinator II
ucs_jws@shsu.edu