Network rendering with Viz 2005

[Conor Clancy]

Hi all, I'm planning on building a 10 pc render farm, but obviously I don't want to buy 10 licenses for WIndows XP if I don't have to. SO my question is, can I run VIZ and backberner server on linux based pcs?

 

If not what other options do I have.

 

Thanks in advance

 

C

[Conor Clancy]

Anybody?

[theqball]

nope, sorry Viz an Max are windows only. if you go above 10 machines in your farm you will need a server machine to manage the frames, textures, and Backburner Manager from. this is due to a 10 machine connection limit on non server windows os.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

nope, sorry Viz an Max are windows only. if you go above 10 machines in your farm you will need a server machine to manage the frames, textures, and Backburner Manager from. this is due to a 10 machine connection limit on non server windows os.

 

not sure, but you might be able to do it without a non server version if you choose to send all textrures, and everything out with each frame. makes sense in my head, but i am not in the mood to test it.

[Conor Clancy]

Thanks for the info guys. I am running my backburner on my company network with about 15 PCs which I can switch to backburner server when the little Cad monkeys go home in the evenings, so the 10 pc limit is not a problem.

I was just hoping that when we setup the dedicated farm I would not have to buy lots of expensive XP licenses. Looks like I will have to.

[theqball]

You can sometimes get away with running more than 10 machines at once. It just comes down to if they happen to all try and connect to the manager at near the same time for updated information, textures, and/or frame output. I too have run 15 machine farms on non server OS but you will randomly get errors on BB and often jobs will fail. Many people attribute this to BB and don't realize it's really an OS limitation that causes it.

[alfienoakes]

As mentioned, the 10 machine limit, is down to the maximum number of "shares" any one machine can take at one time, with Microsoft OS. Its like a simple home network using shares, rather than a domain controller.

 

If you have all your textures etc, and shared resources on a network, with a proper client / server network, you should be able to go beyond this limit.

 

But you would need to purchase server licenses etc.. so more expense..

 

I have never had problems with BB, its mainly Windows OS kicking up a fuss because of the 10 machine limit.

 

Andy

[abicalho]

You won't run into problems if you store files in multiple computers. Just save the data to c:\somefolder and make sure that folder exists in every single computer. Then once the job is done you can go grab the files in each of them.

 

A cheap alternative is to have a Linux File server, if you need to centralize data.

[Conor Clancy]

Thanks for the information guys, but I do not have this problem I'm running this thing through a Nitix server. All textures and models are stored on the server and have had no problems with more than 10 PCs.