Super micro L5420

[fraggle]

Hello,
I have the opportunity to get for less than 300€ 5 blade bi server from supermicro with L5420 xeon with 16 Gb of ram (1 blade = 2 motherboard = 2 CPU).

So for 1500€, I can get 5 of them = 10 cpu with quad core = 40 core

Now, I'm wondering if it's a good investment or not, because I already own a workstation with 24 core (x5650), and this L5420 are not very fast.
Plus the fact that I need to buy extra license.

what will you do yourself?

[Morbid Angel]

well i just bought 8 xeons in blade form also. they are 2x2u servers with dual xeon x5650 so 8 machines in total with 32 gb of ram in them so 96 cores for 4 grand us. Id say your deal is not too bad but i would try scout ebay they have some sweet deals there...
regarding license etc first off those servers are damn loud make sure you have place to store them. license wise yes there is some extra cost...but when you expand there is always that factor. but if you have projects to jastify the spending then its a no brainer. for me i will be selling off my older equipment to recover the cost a bit.

[fraggle]

thanks,
Is there a way to use it as slave without windows to cut down the cost?
What about max, should I get extra license for this server?

Thanks

well i just bought 8 xeons in blade form also. they are 2x2u servers with dual xeon x5650 so 8 machines in total with 32 gb of ram in them so 96 cores for 4 grand us. Id say your deal is not too bad but i would try scout ebay they have some sweet deals there...
regarding license etc first off those servers are damn loud make sure you have place to store them. license wise yes there is some extra cost...but when you expand there is always that factor. but if you have projects to jastify the spending then its a no brainer. for me i will be selling off my older equipment to recover the cost a bit.

[Morbid Angel]

no there is no way to use slaves without windows...Big facilities use linux (its free) but max never worked on linux. You will need windows for each one, you will need all installs of your software, but regarding license I believe you dont need 3ds max license to render with vray. Only vray, so if you are using 2.4 vray (basically not 3) you have unlimited free licenses for the farm under max. So you would not need to license max on the slaves.

[fraggle]

thanks for the advice.

[fraggle]

Just a quick update.
DR is limited to 10 node even on vray 2.4.
BB allow unlimited node.
The main cost, unresolved to date, is the MS windows server license. So for now I'm running all nodes with a trial version valid for 180 days.

I got 15 dual L5420 running fine and one dual L5420 for the date server.

I still need to find out how to speed up node bucket (using DR). Data transfert is not the issues using Giga switch. It seems that the loading time for max on the node side is the bottleneck because even with just one teapot to render the image is done on the master workstation before the node started rendering.

I still got 20 more dual L5420 lying on the floor because I can't feed them with RAM as the DDR2 are more expensive than the server themselves.

no there is no way to use slaves without windows...Big facilities use linux (its free) but max never worked on linux. You will need windows for each one, you will need all installs of your software, but regarding license I believe you dont need 3ds max license to render with vray. Only vray, so if you are using 2.4 vray (basically not 3) you have unlimited free licenses for the farm under max. So you would not need to license max on the slaves.