Wowza Streaming Engine Cluster

Wowza Streaming Engine
1

Hi,

I need to stream live video from several web cameras (over RTMP) through Wowza Streaming Engine.

I have two servers running Wowza Streaming Engine, and I’m not sure what is the correct way to setup my environment so that it will be highly available.

My questions are (and I hope I’m in the right direction):

  1. How do I set up a cluster of the two servers?

  2. Can/should both servers share a configuration (of authentication information for example)?

  3. Should I setup a load balancer in front of the two server?

  4. Where should I point the stream from a web cam at, a specific server or the load balancer? What happens if one server fails in the middle of a live stream, will the video stream still be available?

  5. Where should I point the client applications at, a specific server or the load balancer? What happens if one server fails in the middle of a live stream, will the clients still be able to consume it?

6.Should I set up an origin(s) and edge(s) in order for the setting to work? a bit confused here…

A lot of questions, hoping to get answers :slight_smile:

Thanks,

Ziv

2

  1. Wowza doesn’t have a "cluster-feature’, but it may be possible to implement a solution. Question is: what is the reason for your cluster; is it load-balancing, or fail-over, or maybe both?

  2. Technically you could mount an NFS storage on both servers and pull the config files from it, but I haven’t tested that; and I’m not sure if it’s a good idea if ever one of the servers tries to write to the config files, the other server may protest, or at least the config between the two servers will be out of sync. Usually the configuration doesn’t change that often, and if you need to make changes, it may be better to do it via the REST API and make the same change on both servers.

  3. You may, or you may not. Totally depends on your case.

  4. All this depends on if and how your LB is set up

  5. Same here; but in many cases you can use a CDN and connect your clients to the CDN.

  6. Origin-Edge is only required if you need to relay the stream from one server to another; which is sometimes used in larger-scale setups, or when you want to build a small distribution network. However, for distribution, most often a CDN is the better choice.

There are a lot of options, and it’s not easy to tell what best practice is without knowing more about the case. Fortunately there’s this forums, and there’s also the Wowza Slack community (https://www.wowza.com/slack ). And you may also consider hiring a professional/adviser to help you figure out things. In that case, you can post a message in the “Find A Consultant” forums: https://www.wowza.com/community/spaces/26/find-a-consultant.html , or post a message in the #hire channel on Wowza’s Slack