Grouper Users - Open Discussion List

[David Langenberg <>]

On Thu, Feb 19, 2015 at 4:36 AM, Mandeep Saini <> wrote:

Dear fellow Grouper users,

 

We have started to get acquainted with the Grouper very recently and currently in the process for setting up our test, UAT and production environments. For the same I have few questions:

 

-        What is the recommended capacity dimensions for Grouper VM in terms of CPU/RAM/Storage?

We're running dual cpu 2.67 GHz VMs with 6GB ram.  This is an older install though, so I expect the RAM to go up in our next iteration.  Storage on the grouper servers isn't really a concern as you just have to hold the logs.  The Database is consuming about 50 GB with the majority of that space going to the audit logs and changelog.

 

-        Does anybody have experience of using SQL server with Grouper? If so what was your experience? I am asking this because in one of the training videos I saw Grouper team recommends MySql, PostgreSQl or Oracle and not SQL server but we want to use SQL Server purely for HA reasons as we have SQL cluster already setup and would like to reuse it if possible.

Everybody who's tried to use SQLServer for their grouper DB pretty universally regrets their choice.  Performance is horrible.  If you really do want to use it, though, the project would appreciate any tips, tricks, and pull-requests for fixes of SQLServer performance problems.  That said, Chicago does have the grouper-loader attached to a SQLServer database and finds the performance from that standpoint to be acceptable. We have also played with the idea of using that SQLServer instance as a subject source, but still have a lot of optimization to do before that's ready (it's slow).

 

-        We also need to integrate Grouper with Active Directory Federation Service (ADFS), does anybody on this list have done it? If so can you please share your solution? We are thinking of setting up an attribute authority (Shibboleth IdP) that will speak to Grouper DB and add this AA as additional claim Provider in the ADFS configuration. By defining rule for this Claim Provider we will fetch groups information for user at the login time.

We don't have ADFS, but my recommendation is to not attach Grouper directly to ADFS.  Instead, have Grouper write groups to AD and let AD pull the information from there.

Dave

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David Langenberg

Identity & Access Management

The University of Chicago