Kaltura has been making great progress with simplifying the installation process for the Community Edition. I had previously had relatively easy success installing v9.x on a CentOS LAMP image VPS at Digital Ocean. Now that the current version is Jupiter v10.12, I wanted to install that on my own servers to give it a whirl. I have the BizSpark benefit at Azure, so I figured it would be great to have a media server without the money coming directly out of my pocket.
Unfortunately, installation at Azure wasn’t as easy.
Ubuntu Abounds
The most options for Linux at Azure are Ubuntu images. Kaltura has historically been much easier for me to install on CentOS, but since Kaltura has recently released the platform installation for Ubuntu, I figured I would give it a shot. Long story short, I ran into a number of conflicts and issues, mostly that it would hang when trying to configure MySQL. Not being super keen on troubleshooting Linux conflicts, I decided to explore different options.
VM Depot Kaltura Image
It turns out that there is an image available on VMDepot that includes Kaltura and passes off the encoding and storage to Azure Media Services.
That sounded like a great way to take some of the load off of the “all in one” installation I was planning. So I followed the instructions to install the image in my Azure account and configure the Kaltura installation.
I guess I got a little overexcited and didn’t read the desciption. It turns out that this installs a modified version of Kaltura CE6. Though that was a pretty stable version, I wanted to play with Kaltura v10.x. Not only that, but many features were removed from that Azure-friendly Kaltura installation, most notable of which is the API sandbox and the UI conf editor.
Below is a screenshot of the only menu items available in the admin console.
Upon perusing the User Manual, there is a section called “Features Removed”. Here is everything removed from this version of Azure-friendly Kaltura:
Not included in Microsoft Azure:
- UI Confs (would be implemented in the next version)
- Monitoring (you may use Microsoft Azure Portal for monitoring the VM, “MONITOR” tab under VM details)
- Developer (would be implemented in the next version)
- “Service Packages” section in publisher configuration (Kaltura cloud specific options useless at CE version)
- Publisher profiles
- Widgets (would be implemented in the next version)
- Remote Storage (incompatible with approach to store all media at Microsoft Azure)
- Distribution Profiles (would be implemented in the next version)
- Generic Providers (would be implemented in the next version).
Hmmm … that’s a setback.
CentOS
Then I decided to try the CentOS route again. I tried using some of the images supplied by Azure for CentOS bundled as LAMP, but those all threw RPM errors when trying to install Kaltura and dependencies. Again, not too keen on exploring environment conflicts, I decided to start from scratch.
I installed the CentOS 6.5 minimum image, which is a bare-bones installation of CentOS. Then I installed the rest of the LAMP stack. Though that in itself is not a terribly complicated process, I followed this tutorial from Digital Ocean. love how Digital Ocean does such a great job with laying things out so clearly in their tutorials.
Yay, Success!
After that, I got Kaltura Jupiter installed successfully. Now time to go play.