Moodle portal in virtualized environment — A performance analysis

The Moodle portal of our faculty is running in a virtualized environment together with other about 50 application servers and 60 virtualized desktops. Increasing traffic on the site (reaching over 400 000 views/posts monthly) forced us to assess its performance impact on the virtualization environment. The performance analysis identified processor cycles and disk operations as the bottlenecks of the system. We are planning to address these issues with increasing of the number of processor cores in our virtualization hosts and with a solid state disk upgrade of the disk array used in our virtualization environment in our next hardware upgrade cycle.