We would like to create a new high availability Wowza streaming infrastructure and I would like to know some details regarding the setup that i should choose.
Our main service is VOD so what should I prefer, wowza streaming engine or wowza media server? As I understand the first is the newest and supports everything.
A second question is what is the best setup scenario for my setup for the balancer? I’m thinking to set the origin server as balancer too ,is there a way to use the edges servers as balancers? is it possible the balancing service to running on two edge servers on a active-passive setup?
My last question is which are the steps for the setup I’ve describe before, I need to install the wowza streaming engine on all edge servers and on the origin too? is there a network diagram for such as setup?
That would actually still be a VOD edge application as you described. You can setup a file type of source where this would be content retrieved via standard file reads.
If you have 3 servers in total, one can be the storage server which does not need to run Wowza Streaming Engine, the others will run Wowza Streaming Engine and have your clients connect to them. One of the two servers running Wowza Streaming Engine will be acting as the load balancer to redirect the clients to the least loaded of the two servers running the Wowza software.
For details on the MediaCache part of this configuration, please see the article below.
The load balancer does not have to redirect traffic to itself if you’re worried about the server failing it can direct to the other servers running Wowza Streaming Engine and not itself. I believe that you could have a round robin system that directs traffic to one server or the another both configured to direct load to the servers running as edges (receiving traffic from the load balancer(s)).
You’d need to ensure the edges are checking using round robin too so that they’re reporting to both load balancers.
You can configure a Wowza Streaming Engine server to act as both load-balancer and load-balanced edge application. You do need to have Wowza server installed and running in order to have it respond to client playback requests.
In case you are delivering loadbalanced HTTP streams, then it is not necessary to create a dedicated redirector application, as the redirect is managed through the load balancer http provider.
If you are using your Wowza Streaming Engine server to work in a load-balanced setup, and you wish to deliver video on demand streams., then you can also use the Media Cache feature to have Wowza retrieve the media files from a central storage location (webserver, network storage, etc…). It is not efficient to have the same media files replicated on all your Wowza edge servers, so retrieving them from a central storage location whenever these files are requested by a playback client would help optimize your setup.
Also, here you can find more information regarding the Load Balancing addon available for the Wowza Streaming Engine. The installation and configuration instructions are available in the ZIP package available at that location.
So correct me if im wrong, i can use 3 edge servers at the front where i can run also the balancing service too on two 2 of them and then as a backend i can use just a server (without to install wowza service) where my video will be right?
I have total 4 servers. One of them will be used as a storage server, the remain 3 will be used as edge servers. I’m concerned about the load balancing service, what happens if the server that running this service has a failure? is it possibly in a way that load balancing service running on 2 server alongside?
One more question is for the origin server, origin will provide the VOD files to edges servers. Origin will keep that files on his local disks. Which application should i use for that server? As I can see so far this server should be a live server or a VOD http? is it possible that server to be just a server without wowza streaming service, but just a unc path where the vod files will be?