Queue Manager upgrades

[Spooner04]

Hello all,

I am currently running a render farm with (4) 8 core amd computers with Windows 7 Pro x64 as the farm hub. They are connected as a network and not as a 'homegroup'. Our queue manager is also our file server and has a quad core AMD, 4 gigs of ram, a raid card with a 512mb buffer, and 4tb of storage on raid 5. Backburner is currently dropping nodes at random, which I suspect is an issue with backburner and not the network. We are testing Renderpal to see if that solves the issue.

 

My question is if anyone knows or has experience with when it is appropriate to upgrade to windows server in order maintain the connections to all the render nodes? I suspect that as I start to grow my farm I will eventually hit a cap with how many PC's Windows 7 pro can keep connected. Also, would it be a wise decision to split the file server and the queue manager to different machines? If so, why?

 

Any advice or input is appreciated.

Thanks!