Render Farm Suggestions

Danielmn

Hey guys,
work is having me put together some render farm ideas.

And wanted to see what you guys thought.

It mostly exterior Archtectual work we do. But may down the road do some realflow or fume fx sims


Right now we have 10 dell PC's acting as our farm.

And we would like to get 10 to 20 processors, i7 quads cores or xeon 6 cores.

I was looking in BOXX technologies render farm solutions.

And we dont really have a server rack so I would like to not have to get that, but we do have the space.

I appreciate all ideas. Even if it means I just need to put together 10 pcs builds if needed.


Really interested to see what BOXX competitors there are as well.

gray

don't go to some vendor of a render farm "solution". that's going to get you huge ovehead$$$, service contracts, no flexibility etc. you got 20 boxes... that's totally doable with one of the little render managers that are out there. I would go over to creative crash and look around. I think one is called smedge. there is also a few others that are very cheap. sorry I can't remember the names, its been a while since I looked. google is really good at remembering these sort of thing if you ask!

keep in mind that most large render farms run on linux and have a custom renderQ system with a bunch of custom script code. or at least have a linux license server to keep track of everything. you don't want to do any of that if you don't have to. keep it simple. 20 boxes you could keep it all on windows with one of the render managers I mentioned and a cheap router.

Danielmn

im not sorry worried about the manager software so much at this point more wondering about hardware and cost.

And backburner has been enough for us, although I know there are better software.

Thanks grey.

I saw www.acea.com as well

gray

i see,

well I would still stay away from a "render farm solution provider" if you can. especially if you already have your software pipeline straight which you seem to have. I would get the specs on some of the servers your looking at boxx etc, and see if you can find someone local to build the blades/rack you want. chances are they will give you more config options and give you better support then a bigger vendor.

as for the hardware I don't rally pay much attention on the server side. so someone else can point you in the right direction on that.

Danielmn

Thanks gray i appreciate it

narticus

Hello,

I currently have 2 computers, my desktop and my laptop, with 10 combined processor cores. The new laptop is running Win 8.1 but my desktop is running Win 7. Can I set up Backburner to work properly with this configuration? Are there any alternatives you might suggest?

For some reason the Server app doesn't open on my desktop, but works fine on my laptop. The desktop is able to open the Manager and Monitor apps.

Any advice is appreciated, as always. Thank you.