Ensuring the
stability of your streaming media system
To ensure that your streaming media system is stable, redundant,
and capable of bearing the predicted load, keep the following in
mind:
If you plan to encode live content, it is recommended that you
install the encoder and Windows Media Services on separate
computers. Live encoding requires a large amount of processing
capability; the additional load of serving client requests can
adversely affect the quality of an encoded stream.
Have multiple encoders encoding content so that publishing
points on your Windows Media servers can switch to an alternate
source in case there is a problem on the original encoder
source.
If you want to archive encoded content for later playback, do
not use the encoder to create the archive file. Instead configure
your Windows Media server to create an archived copy. This reduces
the processing load on the encoding computer.
Distribute content between numerous Windows Media servers. This
enables the servers to provide content to different network
segments, which reduces the number of routers that the stream must
traverse in order to reach clients and improves the overall stream
quality. In addition, extra servers provide redundancy and
additional capacity if there are any server problems.
If you intend to stream high volumes of Windows Media files,
consider dedicating a separate NTFS volume for storing the files.
An NTFS volume permits the use of access control list (ACL)
checking on your content files as well as better file management
capabilities.
If you intend to stream high volumes of on-demand video content
that is indexed to support fast-forward, skip, rewind, and pause
capability, consider using the Advanced FF/RW feature to improve
fast-forward and rewind ("trick mode") functionality for the video
portion of encoded files. This feature stabilizes network bandwidth
availability by smoothing the rate at which data is sent, and
reduces potential server performance bottlenecks by reading less
presentation data from the source content disk, all while
delivering a seamless experience to clients. Copies of the original
source content files must be created that support the different
fast-forward or rewind speeds requested by clients.
Consider using multicast streaming with unicast rollover. Multicast streaming
can deliver content to any number of clients from a single stream.
When additional clients connect through a multicast-enabled
network, they do not require extra bandwidth from the server or
place an additional load on the network, thus increasing the
efficiency of the stream.
Note
Advanced FF/RW is available only if Windows
Media Services 9 Series is running on the following editions of the
operating system: Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition, and
Windows Server 2003, Datacenter Edition. If you are running Windows
Server 2003, Standard Edition, this feature is not supported.
Note