For the past 2 years, Marist College has embarked on an adventure. First, moving from a CICS based ERP to one that is entirely based on open platform, Sungard's Banner. If changing all of the college's business processes wasn't enough fun, Marist also became the first customer to do it entirely on Linux on System z. From our first steps implementing the Oracle database to our recent experience handling hundreds of student registration transactions at the same time, the entire process has had many ups and downs.
The presentation will cover how we implemented the Banner infrastructure, some of the challenges that we faced and how we have been able to handle them. We will discuss both the benefits of running in a virtualized environment, plus some of the special problems. Finally, we'll cover the methodology used to load test the infrastructure and steps we took to tune the database and the virtual environment.