Friday, July 6, 2012

System Requirements for Windows Media Services

Besides requiring a Windows Server 2008 R2 system (Web Edition, Standard Edition, Enterprise Edition, or Datacenter Edition), the basic requirements for Windows Media Services are as follows:

. Processor—One or more processors running at 550MHz or higher
. Memory—512MB of RAM or higher
. Hard disk space—A minimum of 2GB
. File system—NTFS
. Ethernet network adapter running TCP/IP

Although these are the minimum hardware specifications provided by Microsoft, most server class systems today typically consist of Dual Quad-Core, a minimum of 8GB of RAM, and at least a gigabit network adapter.

What’s key to the Windows Media Services system is having enough processing speed to handle the media streaming requests, enough RAM to cache the media streams, and enough disk space to store the video files being shared and published. In addition, it is a best practice to use a dedicated server for streaming, limit the total number of users to 50% of the maximum user capacity achieved by the load tests, and ensure the overall network utilization is less than 50% of the maximum network interface capacity.

It is important for readers to know that some features such as the Advanced Fast Start and the Cache/Proxy Management functionality only operate if Windows Media Services is installed on a Windows Server 2008 R2, Enterprise Edition or Datacenter Edition.

To improve the performance of a Windows Media Services system, place the operating system and program files on one volume and place the video files on another volume to distribute the normal server processes from the read/write access of the video files. In addition, placing striped drive sets with ample hard drive controller cache can improve both the sequential and parallel read/write requests of the video files as Windows Media Services is more I/O intensive than processor intensive.

Source of Information : Sams - Windows Server 2008 R2 Unleashed

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