Run VRay Spawner on Computer Idle

[rmccoy]

Hi everyone,

 

Is there a way to automatically turn on the VRay spawner when a machine becomes idle? I have a potential render farm of around 10-15 computers I can use at the office. However It becomes a hassle to turn on the vray spawner everytime a person leaves the office.

 

We are currently running windows 7 64-bit and vray 1.5 sp5.

 

Ideally I would be able to do this with the backburner server also.

[Ricardo Eloy]

Here's an idea: you could create a "render" login. Everytime a person leaves the office, that person can logoff his/her user and login as the "render"user. That login could start the VRaySpawner as a service.

OR

I guess it would be possible to write a small program to run as a service and monitor the computer's status (the same way Windows already does to start the screensaver). Then, instead of starting the screensaver, it would start another .exe ;-) It might even be possible to use one of those free screensaver creators to do that...

[rmccoy]

Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

 

I already have a render login setup on the computers. I really want to get away from doing that since it requires me to manually start everything.

 

Your second idea is basically what I am looking for. I wonder if there is a way to set this up easily? That way I can avoid having to login each time.

[Thablanch]

Not really what you requested but still:

 

http://buchhofer.com/

 

there is the Server Utils Light, allows you to remoteley start stop servicesm like Vray Spawner, VrayRT or Backburner. By selection station name and dtart/stop toggle, quite usefull If you have a visual access to your co-workers, and when they are not there, manage their station with that tool.

[Dave Buchhofer]

We're doing something a bit differently nowadays, theres a few little tweaks that can be done to Windows7 (if Nvidia card) that allow you to log in multiple interactive users at once via Remote Desktop, so we just have the ability to throw a 'Render' login on at all times, without messing up the normal users interactive life. Its nice, it allows us to steal some processor time off of some of the not-fully-utilized fancypants 'Revit' workstations pretty seamlessly. (Assuming you play nicely with processor affinitys and ram use.)

 

this sort of leaves the resource usage problem in the hands of the artists, but so far that problem hasn't surfaced too much since theres only a few of us.

 

I actually haven't used the remote tools in a while, i need to update them to deal with the multiple interactive user thing! its pretty harsh if you /pskill a 3dsmax.exe on a remote machine without knowing easily which user started that process.

 

Its not great, theres a bit more manual starting/stopping, but its better in that you can just have a notification that the machine went down/rebooted, and either set it to start up as services, or manually.

 

the playing in that farm management direction sort of died down once VraySpawner got stable enough to not worry about having to restart it, and also coincided with the shrinking of our renderfarm.

 

I'd looked previously into how to tell if the machine was idle or active or how long the machine has been idle, and theres no *easy* built in way to do it to a remote machine, so it would have necessitated a full ReFaMo type system where you build a client exe and a server exe, and the costs to do that vs the stability thats available finally thanks to 64bit/vray wasn't worth the effort for just me.

 

I looked into the screensaver bit at one point, there are a couple aftermarket tools that you can use to do that, but i never pursued it out to find out how well they would work.

[illiopic]

Create a scheduled task to run the vrayspawner 'service' at the end of the day.

Edited October 12, 2010 by illiopic

[Camby1298]

Here's an idea: you could create a "render" login. Everytime a person leaves the office, that person can logoff his/her user and login as the "render"user. That login could start the VRaySpawner as a service.

 

This is our workflow here (With IT security), unfortunatly as we have about 70+ machines now that can be logged on to the farm. Under the account we Backburner Server and Vray Spawner set to start up instantly as soon as youre logged in. It's a hassle; as you have to wait till later that day for everyone to go home to re-log in as a render account. Especially if the animation lasts for days, it gets tiresome. Hopefully with cloud rendering comes into play this will change and will be able to do set up the nodes remotely.