Tommy L Posted April 14, 2009 Share Posted April 14, 2009 I have a small network in the studio which consists of a workstation, 7 render nodes and a laptop. All these machines are hooked into a switch, which in turn is linked to the company server/backup, which is where I work from (all files are held on the server). And Im very happy with it. However, the photography dept has about 6 macs, all intel based. They are also connected to the server. So, if I were to bootcamp the macs and install all of the necessary 3dsMax/Vray etc I could theoretically use them for rendering. My question is: Does the 10 computer limit for windows networking apply for these machines? IE, do I need a license of windows server somewhere on the network? Thanks, Tom. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BrianKitts Posted April 14, 2009 Share Posted April 14, 2009 (edited) yes once you bootcamp the mac's they will act no different than any of your other machines or rendernodes, which means that yes the 10 connection limit will be a problem for you. If the machine with all the files isn't running a server OS then that means that yes to get full use of the machines you'd want to upgrade to a server OS on the system that hosts your files. Edited April 14, 2009 by BrianKitts Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rmccoy Posted April 14, 2009 Share Posted April 14, 2009 I am no expert by any means on this. But if you are running windows server on your server/backup machine you should be fine. Whatever machine is hosting your models and maps for you scene needs to have windows server installed in order to be able to use more than 10 machines at a time. This goes for some nas systems as well. I ran into an issue where we hosted all of our files on a buffalo nas system and it had the 10 pc limit also. We constantly had buckets missing when trying to use Distributed Rendering. It's just something to think about also. Good luck with the set up. Let us know how the Intel based mac works on the farm. I would like to run my macbook pro at home on my network for rendeirng if I could. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dave Buchhofer Posted April 14, 2009 Share Posted April 14, 2009 You can run the farm manager on a regular machine, but you will want a Server OS for your file server, in your case you're probably on the edge, and it'll work 90% of the time, but occasionally you'll find yourself with a missing map that wouldn't load or a frame that wouldn't write out to disk from the renderfarm. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tommy L Posted April 14, 2009 Author Share Posted April 14, 2009 Wow, quick answers. I guess everyone is on the net on Tuesday mornings.... The server is a mac, so Ill ask more info from the guy responsible when he comes in. Thanks! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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