Wowza hosting & Load Balancer Specifications

Wowza Streaming Engine
1

Howdy Buddies,

I got here a doubt some might be able to splash some light towards, we have a training videos data base that expected to have following aspects:

  • 7000 - 10000 viewers same time

  • Quality of each video 5-7Mbps

Key h/w used:

  • Two dedicated servers in the same facility

  • Load balancer in between of this two servers

Question:

  • What server hardware specifications would you consider needed for an load balancer expected to handle the amount of users/streaming as written above?

  • What server model/specifications you would consider reasonable for such setup?

  • Bandwidth: would 1Gbps dedicated link per each one of the two servers be enough to start with for this amount of traffic?

Highly appreciate anyone’s feedback towards this project,

Thank you,

Ronald

B-E-Z-

2

Hi Ronald,

It’s difficult to be precise about this, particularly with regards to traffic and server loading expectations. I would suggest requesting our Load Testing Tool. This can be used to simulate viewer streaming sessions. Then a simple monitoring of the hardware should show potential capabilities and bottlenecks. You can also find a number of “streaming bandwidth calculators” online, if you do a search for that term. They can be useful to quickly calculate network requirements.

If you are looking at more than one Wowza server providing access to the same video sources then I’d suggest looking at our MediaCache AddOn. This will help reduce network bandwidth to the central source files. It handles calls to the central file source, either over HTTP or filesystem requests such as NFS. It caches any parts of a file that is requested by a viewer on the Wowza “Vod Edge” server so future calls will be serviced locally. It can also then be easier to expand for future growth by simply adding more Wowza Edge servers.

You could tie that in together with Wowza’s Dynamic Load Balancer AddOn.

Paul