We are now on the planning stage of migrating our Wowza streaming engine from Physical to Virtual Machine. Is there any required parameter or specification for Wowza using Virtual Machine?.
Current Wowza Physical Server Specs are:
2 X 10 GE NIC card
256 MB RAM each
SAN based discs
20 Cores Intel E7 CPU each server
The above will be the same when we will deploy it to the Virtual Machine.
Other info:
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Average viewers are 500
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Only available within Internal Network
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1 Origin and 2 Edge (all the same specs as above)
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Using 1 Epiphan Pearl 2 Encoder
Do you need 256GB RAM? Check your Java Heap size usage (default max is 10GB), and if you’re doing streaming only, your VMs may be smooth even with 16 or 32GB.
Same for CPU cores; unless you’re doing transcoding (in which case you could also consider a GPU like NVidia Grid). Without transcoding you’d need a tiny bit of CPU for packaging (converting to HLS and/or MPEG-DASH), but if you’re distributing on an internal network, are you even doing HLS/DASH? So I’d say 2-4 cores could even be enough.
The nice advantage of VMs is that you can easily assign less, or more resources when required (provided that the host has the resources available)