XP Pro or XP Home?

[tricky]

OK, trying to save money here building a new render farm.

Ideally I'd like Linux as its free, but I believe it will lead me into problems. So the next thing to consider is XP Home on all of the renderslaves. Would this work? I don't think I've ever used Home edition before.

Failing this, I would obviously have to install the usual XP Pro - but this works out significantly more expensive.

[DanielBrew]

Tricky

Don't know whether you've seen this but it might help you choose,

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/p...choosing2.mspx

Note that XP Home doesn't support multiple proccessors or remote desktop.

Dan

[instinct]

my suggestion would be dont go Home! Remote Access is vital to admininistrating a renderfarm in my eyes...so is support for multiprocessor systems. we only got pro here in our farm

Just my two cents.

Thorsten

[tricky]

We have never used Remote Access thus far. Does it basically mean that I can control each of of the machines from my workstation without having a keyboard/mouse/monitoe attached to any of the slaves?

It'd certainly save me getting up and walking next door all the time to check what they are all doing!

[percydaman]

We have never used Remote Access thus far. Does it basically mean that I can control each of of the machines from my workstation without having a keyboard/mouse/monitoe attached to any of the slaves?

It'd certainly save me getting up and walking next door all the time to check what they are all doing!

yes it will... indespensable IMO

[tricky]

So, just to confirm, If I buy 10 more renderslaves to my current setup, I WILL NOT need to buy a 16-port (or whatever) KVM switch and all necessary cables?

A side question: has anyone setup a render farm with wireless g network? Obviously, the speed of wireless g will not be as fast as 100 MBit, but it would save a hell of a lot of cabling! Is the speed *such* an issue when doing DR and rendering frames of an animation?

[CCS]

#1 - Yes, that's what remote is for. You won't need monitors or even a KVM.

#2 - Wireless will work. Or you could just put all the textures on 5.25" floppies and take them to each machine. Might be faster. (Buy the cables!)

#3 - XP home is barely even suited for home use.

[Da_elf]

can you guys quickly walk me through the setup and use of remote access? when ever i install winxp i usually turn that stuff off since i believe it wastes resourses. however it would be extreamly usefull. means no more monitor switching.

[dennis]

i use a KVM switch even though i also use remote desktop. dont you have to have a monitor connected to boot ? i think you will miss it from time to time, but thats just my opinion.

if you have a server with a domain controller on it you wont be able to join the domain with xp home.

ohh and dont go wireless what are they still 11mbit? that is slow! transferring solutions with 200-800+ mb is a killer for a connection like that. i upgraded our 100mbit network to a gigabit because of it.

[Syclone1]

I have to agree with the others where wireless would suck for net renders as it can be painfully slow as the technology is still fairly new. I have a high speed wireless "G" WAP here for my laptop and cant stand using it for rendering as its painfully slow, so Ive since ran a cable for it. Its great for surfing the web or checking email but cant seem to handle anything more intensive.

I also seem to remember that discreet had once said that 3dsmax will not run on XP Home and I also would not recomend it as its only marginally better than (shiver) Win ME.

As far as the remote admin goes I used to use remote desktop alot till percydaman got me on to RealVNC ( http://www.realvnc.com/ ) which I use alot and has proven to be a valuable tool not to mention its FREE and works great on all the systems Ive tried running XP Pro, 2K, 98se...

-dave

[percydaman]

I got you going on RealVNC? lol, I recall using it in the past when I didn't have access to remote access through winxp.

Personally I couldn't do without both remote AND KVM. but if I could only have one, Id go for remote access. Its great to be able to login from home and check up on stuff at work.

[Syclone1]

Hmmm maby it was Vsai then

Anyway the main reason I like it, is I have a mix of Win 2K and XP Pro machines here and cant use remote desktop with the Win 2K machines. So with RealVNC I can use it for any of the operating systems and it seems faster at handling the data also. But then again Im on gigabit here

Also I have a KVM on the servers down staris with a 17" lcd, mouse, kb just in case I cant access one of them over the network.

-dave

[Dynedain]

Use RealVNC instead of the built in windows remote desktop - oh, and it's free.

Use XP Pro (or Win2k if it works with your procs - no HT i believe). XP Home has stripped down a lot of the networking features and can be problematic. Win2k would b ebest because you can strip out the bloat a lot easier, and it requires less overall resources to run.

Look into volume licensing, you can get it cheaper than $200/license that way.

[instinct]

XP´s remote is doing it´s job pretty nicely here...didnt try that vnc thing so far tho. As far as wireless is concerned...dont...we recently upgraded to Gigabit network as 100MBit was seriously slowing down our workflow...and what´s the point in buying a nice renderfarm and bottleneck it with wireless :P

Thorsten

[trick]

What problems were you guys having using XPHome single proc.renderslaves ? I have a mixed 2K/Home/Pro farm and never had ANY problems with the Home slaves: no crashes, equally fast network trafic and control with realVNC, etc...