Migration of older Playout versions to Playout 6

Migration of older Playout versions to Playout 6

Introduction

Icareus Playout 4 runs on the CentOS 6 operating system, which reached end of life on November 30th, 2020. Because of this, Icareus developed Playout 5 which runs on CentOS 7 and Playout 6 which runs on CentOS 7 and on Rocky 8. It's recommended that all existing users of Playout 4 or Playout 5 eventually upgrade to running Playout 6. The migration can involve exporting the Playout configuration from the old servers and importing it to the new servers.

Migration from Playout version 4 to Playout 6

Servers

Icareus recommends that users of Playout 4 keep their old installations working and install the Rocky 8 operating system on new servers, where Playout 6 will be installed. This way the new installations can be tested and configured without an interruption in service. After Playout 6 has been installed and configured, it can be put in production and the old servers can eventually be retired. Playout 6 can also be installed in a virtual environment (virtual machine / cloud) as long as the environment runs Rocky 8 and the architecture is x86_64 compatible.

Configuration

One alternative is to rebuild existing the configuration by hand on Playout 6. In this case the latest Playout 6 version can be installed on the servers directly.
The recommended way to upgrade is to export the configuration of the older Playout servers and import them on the new servers. This is especially useful if a lot of work has been made with the configuration. For example it might contain many DVB networks, services or applications.
The preferred way to move the configuration over from Playout 4 to 6 is to first upgrade the Playout 4 servers to the last version, which is Playout version 4.6.7.3. Running 4.6.7.3, the configuration is exported. On the new servers, first Playout 4.6.7.x is installed. The configuration is then imported on the server. Once this step has been done the new server can be updated to the newest Playout version.
Alternatively, if an upgrade of the old installation to 4.6.7.3 is out of the question, Icareus can perform the necessary conversion of the configuration to be compatible with Playout 6.

Migration from Playout version 5 to Playout 6

For Playout 5, running on CentOS 7, it can be directly upgraded to the latest version of Playout 6. Alternatively, if the servers are upgraded to new ones, Rocky 8 Linux should be used on the new servers and the configuration can be migrated from the latest Playout version running on CentOS 7 to the same version on Rocky 8.


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