WOWZA Server VM Compatability & Web Server Sizing

[Srinath_Gopalakrishn]

Hello - We have successfully tested WOWZA demo version and are in the process of purchasing the full version along with the Transcoder module. I have a couple of questions as we plan on the Production infrastructure and its scalability.

A. Is WOWZA Server with Transcoder module certified for Virtualized environments? While i find that users asking similar questions getting re-directed to the Performance tuning and Physical server platform benchamrking specification weblinks, I was wondering if there are formal benchmarking / certification done for WOWZA with add-on modules on VM enviroments. Since my client is preferring a virtualized enviroment, I wanted to be sure as integrators that we don’t end-up having performance issues post roll-out. My client’s environment consists of a max of two (2) simultaneous live streams with about 3500+ users.

B. Since 3500+ users are expected to be part of the live webcast running on Multicast using Silverlight player (HTTP), are there any Web Server Sizing considerations that i need to factor? We are planning to run Microsoft IIS 7 on a Dual CPU Quad Core, 8 GB, 3.00 GHZ hardware platform.

Your input on the above would be highly apprecaited.

Thanks

SG

[Richard_Lanham]

SG,

Wowza is not particularly certified in any way for virtual environments, but as long as there is enough cpu, ram and bandwidth to handle 3500 clients it should work. We generally recommend a late model quad or dual quad cpu, 4 - 8g ram, 64bit OS and 64bit Java JDK

The web server will only serve the player and its html container, an average web server should be enough.

Richard

[Randall_Auriemma]

Hi sgopalkr,

A. Note that the AWS services that are used successfully with Wowza are “Virtual”. The reason why commodity VPS solutions are discouraged for use with Wowza is because they are often far below the recommended requirements, e.g. 768MB of RAM instead of 4GBs. Additionally, low-end VPS servers often have unpredictable CPU load which is not recommended for real-time streaming applications which require sustained CPU availability.

3500 streams at 500kbps is going to saturate around 2 Gigabits per second of network throughput. I do not think most single commodity VPS solutions are able to handle that kind of traffic. There are not formal “VPS” benchmarks that I know of. Once again, the problem is that a VPS user cannot control the actual resources available, so such benchmarks may be misleading.

If you are new to Wowza, or creating a new service, my suggestion is to investigate developing your solution in AWS using the Wowza loadbalancer and an origin-edge configuration.

Alternatively, if your client insists on their preferred VPS solution, you can request the Wowza load-testing tool to check the throughput, which is always recommended before any new setup is finalized.

B. For your webserver you’ll want to calculate your bandwidth costs to deliver the HTML and the player code for each user, and ensure this fits within your other bandwidth calculations.

Question: If you have an 8-core webserver, are you not able to run Wowza from it? Maybe you can make that your origin-edge and then add new VPS instances to the loadbalancer pool as required.