Where is your Backburner Manager?

[mikeeee2]

After filling up the production server one too many time my firm is finally going to get a file server dedicated to animation.

My question for you guys/gals is where is the best place to run the backburner manager from?

I have about 30 machines for rendering and in the past I have used my primary workstation as the manager, with some small problems like servers crashing on the first frame and then running with out problems.

Is it reasonable to run the manager on the file server as there are no connection limits? Or is this a bad idea due to some thing that I have not forseen.

Thanks in advance for any help you may provide

-Erickson

[ShaunDon]

We've always run the backburner manager on our file server -- it's a beefy Dell server and all it does is swap files back and forth, so I don't think you'd have any performance issues on your network. Unless you have another spare machine that isn't taking part in the render and is always on, the file server is the best option.

Shaun

[Dynedain]

We have the backburner manager running on a Win2k server that is also handling some other network tasks (like being one of the domain controllers, the vray license server, etc.). Actually this server is a pretty old machine, a P3 450Mhz Xeon I believe.

Our fileserver is a "network appliance" that appears to be running some kind of Linux or BSD build - so there's no connection limits there.

Our rendernodes are Win2k nodes that have no monitor, keyboard, mouse, or removeable media drives. The backburner server and vrayspawner are running as services that login as a specific "3dsmaxuser" user account that has appropriate permissions across the network.

Our 3D workstations are WinXP, with logons done through active directory.

[mikeeee2]

Thanks guys I apreciate the help. I think this is going to help me quite a bit.
-Erickson