Upgrade Your Server

There are continuous improvements in LiveSwitch. Therefore, it's important to keep your LiveSwitch Server upgraded so that you can take advantage of the latest features. This process is as easy as possible. To upgrade to the latest version quickly and painlessly, simply download the latest LiveSwitch version and run the installer. Your pre-existing settings are saved, so you do not have to re-configure your servers.

Components Upgraded First

If your Gateway and Media server are on the same host, then you don't need to worry about this. The installer updates them both at the same time. If your services are on different hosts, then it is only a bit more complicated. The golden rule is to always upgrade your Gateway service first. The Gateway service is backwards compatible with older versions of LiveSwitch. By upgrading the gateway first, you ensure that there are no interruptions for any clients that are using older versions of LiveSwitch. If you upgrade your client applications or media servers before your gateway, then you run the risk of the gateway rejecting your connections because it has not been upgraded yet.

Expected Downtime

If all of your services are on one host, the downtime is minimal. The installer terminates each service, and restarts it immediately after the upgrade. If your services are on separate hosts, the upgrade should be painless as well, provided you follow the upgrade order described above. There is a brief interruption as each service restarts, and the service is available again afterwards. The next question addresses scenarios where seamless upgrading is required.

Terminate Services

To ensure minimal downtime for your users and also that your upgrade process does not interrupt their use of your service, you must have at least two gateway servers and at least two media servers. With two media servers, you can upgrade each one individually, ensuring that there are no service interruptions. Through the gateway administration panel you can tell a Media Server to "deactivate" itself. This is a slow shutdown - the Media Server does not accept any new connections during this time. Once you have determined that it is safe to do so (no connections remaining) it is up to your Dev-ops team to shut down the Media Server. By design, Media Servers do not shut down automatically. Once the Media Server has been shut down you can upgrade it without interrupting any users' session. You can do this for each Media Server in turn, until all are upgraded.

For a seamless upgrade of gateway services, you must ensure that you have at least two Gateway services and that they are both configured to use a Redis backend, rather than the default in-memory backend. The Redis backend ensures that existing clients' connection information is propagated to all gateway servers. The extra gateway service ensures that when a gateway service goes down, your clients seamlessly reconnect to the next available gateway service.

Upgrade Linux

The LiveSwitch Linux distribution does not have an installation script, so upgrading requires slightly more manual intervention. Follow the same basic guidelines for a Windows upgrade. However, instead of running the installer, stop each service using systemctl, copy the new files to the LiveSwitch service's directory, and then restart the service.