Currently we are only using one server and can handle about 4 simultaneous streams with a total of 3000 connections thus using 10Gb/s while transcoding all streams to 3 different qualities. Now i understand how live stream repeaters work and the basics of load balancing since our server is running 2 instances of wowza. But my question is, how do expand our setup to more servers while still transcoding all streams and keeping it easy for the streamers, that is to say that they only have to stream to one address for convenience sake? Is there a lot of coding needed?, because we don’t want to mess with every stream manually, but instead just have a system running that doesn’t need a lot of attention?
Thanks in advance, Christian.
Hi Christian,
You can have one Wowza instance ingest the incoming streams and transcode these into different qualities, and have the edge/load balancing client servers serving your client connections. The edge servers would not need to do any transcoding, but would just need to pull the streams from the origin. This was covered pretty succinctly in this response from rrlanham.
You would then just need to configure your current server as a load balancing master, and configure additional servers as the load balancing clients. Your streamers would not need to know about the edge servers, and your client connections can be properly redirected to the least loaded server.
Here are some tutorials that may help you:
Load Balancing Overview
Scaling and Load Balancing Overview
Michelle
Hi Christian,
Some coding will be required.
There are few ways on how to better accomplish this, one of them may be to write a module that will republish stream from core server to least loaded server in your “transcoding cluster”.
Another option may be to make certain request to transcoding cluster to pull the stream, transcode it, and push back.
So basically as I understand you’re talking about setting up “transcoding farm”.
I can do the whole coding and setup process for you (I’m Wowza consultant).
If you’re interested - please contact me by email: roman@dynamicstreaming.net
I don’t think you quite understood what i meant, we want to have the streamers to stream to one ip adress/domain and then have their streams automatically assigned to the least loaded origin/transcoding server and then be able to be retrieved by the edges for restreaming to the clients. so we would like an automated system for this, is there any such thing like that that can be configured with just wowza, or does there have to be custom coding and so on?
Thanks, Christian