Best os for render farm?

[sfeely]

I have 4 dell 1u servers with no OS and was wondering If I should use xp 64?

[Da_elf]

im guessing xp pro64 is the best for the render nodes however i think it still has the 10 computer limit that normal xp pro has and you might want a different OS for the server

[idesign]

....and the cpu's have to support EMT64 for XPpro x64.... go to

http://www.dellcommunity.com/supportforums

DELL only support (officialy) windows server or linux in their rack machines... but we have 6 rendernodes in XPpro x64 (1U server machines..) some drivers for the hardware don't come with Windows XP... only Windows Server... but with some workaround..

[Da_elf]

my 3 year old boxx dual (single core) opteron is running on winxp64 and its been sweeeeeet. most solid machine ive ever had and the OS never blue screened and i dont believe ive ever had an error message or a crash on it

[werticus]

been running xp64 for 3 years now on all my machines, best os ever.

also found that for some rare and special items you cant find drivers for (like 200 yr old printers) that you might find a vista 64 driver that will work anyway!

[DrJan]

While I do think XP64 is more stable and I haven't had any problems with it, I find the support for hardware rather disappointing.
If you're just using it for rendering etc it's ok, but I also use my system for other stuff. Our CAD application doesn't work on XP64 for instance. And I can't connect my Sony-Ericsson phone to it either because of lack of x64 drivers