Windows Server 2008 – Fixing Choppy Audio and Video on Terminals

A few thoughts;

• What's your client software, this is very important, specific versions on specific OSs - this will define your streaming software.
• What are your stream profiles, do you intend to pre-encode or do you have/expect-to cross-encode on the fly?
• Have you done your maths on average and burst bandwidth requirements for this, is your top end figure taking into account the entire path from disk/memory to CPU, IO, NICs, L2, L3, load-balancers, firewalls, any VPNs you might have/need, external routing, onward transit etc.
• Are you planning on serving non-stream traffic (front page, transactional etc) from the streaming server? if so why as this traffic can easily handle jitter but video can't - consider splitting your front-end into workload types, makes for easier scale-out.
• Consider now how you're going to 'tap' into live content, there's a good chance that you'll need this ability for rights compliance.

As for hardware, well it sounds to me that you need both performance and resilience, you'll struggle to get this at bargain basement prices, stick to one of the mid/big-boys (Dell or better) rather than build-your-own - you're going to be busy enough as it is.

Hope this has been of some use.

Is the Audio Service running on the server? Check the tray icon and Task Manager Services tab.