Distributed Rendering Farm Architecture

[gibsondm]

You'll have to excuse my ignorance when it comes to rendering as I am not an expert in this area (I'm just an IT nerd). I've been tasked with building out a new rendering environment for one of our architects and am having some trouble finding a few details. Hopefully some of you can help me find the answers. Here's what is planned for the environment:

-Two High-End Desktops for design
-10 dedicated servers for rendering
-1TB storage

I've been given three objectives in the project: it needs to be secure, it needs to be fast, it needs to be backed up.

My question is, where is the best place for the storage? Should it be something like a NAS or SAN or is an internal disk on one of the servers adequate?

Any help you can give would be appreciated.

[DanielBrew]

If you're building a render farm you are far better off having a dedicated machine for running Backburner manager (or similar), holding licenses (VRay license server) and storing files. Rendering tends to saturate the processors and use all available RAM so if you use one of the slaves for filing they often become unresponsive to requests for files when they are rendering. A NAS might be an option but we bought a NAS and can only use it for archiving because it just isn't fast enough to be used as a file server. Maybe we just bought a cheap one.

Dan

[dbibb]

Yep, keep the file server dedicated if you can. We run a dedicated server with Windows Server 2003 on it. This serves all our files, runs the Vray license server, backburner manager, and the Archvision content manager. With this setup we seem to avoid the missing maps problems that a lot of people have with distributed rendering. We're able to use mapped drives without problems too.

Make sure everything else is 64 bit.
For the render nodes, you don't need graphics cards, they don't contribute to rendering. The more CPU cores the better. Generally we put in at least 1GB of RAM per core.

For the workstations, get the best graphics card you can afford. I'd rather have the top-of-the-line gaming card than a mid-level workstation card.

[gibsondm]

Great. Thank you for the advice. I'll plan on going with a dedicated server for licensing and file storage.