Live streaming is gaining popularity this year at St. Mark’s. On Palm Sunday, we had 145 simultaneous live viewers running a 340 Kbps (320×240) live stream.

Windows Media Services

Unfortunately, the bandwidth on our dedicated server began to choke and users were complaining that the service was a little choppy. We had already ordered a second server from 1&1 early last week to help offset the load, but it still isn’t ready. I called around a few buddies and thankfully Emad volunteered a box he has in a different data center.

Setting up additional Windows Media streaming servers is pretty straightforward:

  1. Make sure that the publishing point on your first server is up and running, see my Live Windows Media Streaming Mini-Howto for more details on this.
  2. Login or remote desktop into the second server and open up the Windows Media Services MMC – it should be located under Administrative Tools. (Windows Media Services and its MMC can be installed using Add/Remove Windows Components).
  3. Right click on Publishing Points and choose Add Publishing Point (Advanced)…
  4. Publishing point type: Broadcast
    Publishing point name: Use the same name that you are using on your first server
    Location of content: This is the publishing point on your first server.
    Content type: Remote Publishing PointAdd Publishing Point
  5. Click Play on the bottom of the Monitor page for the new publishing point.
  6. Test out the stream from another computer by browsing to mms://server2/publishingpoint.

Once the second server is up and running, you can make it available to your end users in a couple different ways:

  1. You can list links to both servers directly on your website and place limits in the properties section of your publishing point so that when one as at capacity they will be forced to use the other.
  2. You can setup Round Robin DNS – create A records with the IP addresses of both servers using the same host name, users will be directed to the alternating IP addresses, should create an approximate 50/50 load on the servers. You must use the same name for the publishing point on both servers for this to work.

We actually wanted to place about 2/3 of the load on the first server so we created two A records for the first and one for the second.

This method can be used to add any number of additional Windows Media streaming servers.