64Bit render farm question

[MikeHampton]

I know this is more of a Max question than a vray question.. but know that I will get a quick answer here.


We're looking at getting more machines for our renderfarm and I want to get in one machine first set up in a 64 bit environment and see if everything plays nice with our 32 bit environment. And I know a lot of you have already gone through this.

My question is... is anyone out there running the max backburner and Vray in 64 bit on a renderfarm machine that's running anything other than windows 64bit?

I guess the problem is with our IT department is that they want to get "servers" rather than workstations.. and apparently getting 64bit windows for the servers is going to cost us an extra $800 per machine. Personally.. I don't know why that is, but I'm just the messanger.

Obviously we would rather not spend an extra $800 per machine... so is anyone running anything other than windows on their renderfarm in 64 bit?

Because apparently our only other option is to avoid these extra cost is to buy workstations.. and our IT guy would rather not stack up a bunch of workstations on top of each other.


Any thoughts?

[natty]

Hi

we have 200 nodes running 64bit xp pro, never had any problems.
why on earth do you need server operating systems on these nodes ?

[dlparisi]

So by "servers" I assume your IT dept means rackmount servers instead of "workstations" which are towers, right? There's no reason you can't install regular XP x64 on a regular rackmount server which costs basically the same as the 32bit version. Where are you getting the servers from?

[Da_elf]

and keep a rag around to clean up the puddles of drool you will leave behind every time you render something

[MikeHampton]

So by "servers" I assume your IT dept means rackmount servers instead of "workstations" which are towers, right? There's no reason you can't install regular XP x64 on a regular rackmount server which costs basically the same as the 32bit version. Where are you getting the servers from?

That's what I would assume also... I don't understand the reason, so I can't explain it. I'm just the messenger looking if there are other options.

[deepblue812]

we run XP64 on all our rackmount servers for our farm (about 25 total)
and XP64 on all our workstation machines.

Tell your IT folks that just because it's a 'server' and/or Xeon/Opteron machine, it doesn't have to run Windows Server™ (and in fact XP64 is built off of the Windows Server kernal, not the XP one, iirc)

We do run regular XP pro 32-bit on our license / backburner manager machine. Mainly because all our licenses/plugins/etc are sitting on there and didn't feel the need to upgrade it to 64-bit when everything was already working fine (the whole 'if it ain't broke...' approach)

SJ

[RErender]

If they have an enterprise license of windows server it would be fine to run Max on that, if they want to run linux or something else it's not going to happen.

If they think there is a difference between a workstation and a server other than it's case... got to love those IT guys...

hmm, unless it's an Itanium, or a 4 way+ system or something

[instinct]

There also is componentwise usually...serverboards usually offer extra nicities like hardware monitoring, mobo embedded admin consoles and alike...also you usually get different guarantuees etc. If that's wanted/needed is up to the IT i guess...and also severly depends on the rest of the infrastructure and the size of the farm.

Regards,
Thorsten

[Da_elf]

thats why i only let our technician fix our secretaries computer.

[RErender]

There also is componentwise usually...serverboards usually offer extra nicities like hardware monitoring, mobo embedded admin consoles and alike...also you usually get different guarantuees etc. If that's wanted/needed is up to the IT i guess...and also severly depends on the rest of the infrastructure and the size of the farm.

Regards,
Thorsten

ok, if you want to split hairs, heh, if they are buying those for farm boxes they coulf probably get twice the render power for the same budget...

[joconnell]

The only machine you'll need a server os on is your file server that holds your 3d scenes, textures and the folders that your output renders to - you need to make sure that this machine or machines can handle enough machines connected to it at the same time. The render nodes themselves just need ram and cpu grunt and that's it.

[idesign]

When I buy my rendernodes from Dell (rackmount 1950 servers) and I ask for XP x64 they tell me… “We don’t support XP in these machines (not tested )… only Windows Server…”
So I have to install my self de XP x64… one problem is that XP don’t have SAS drivers on installation… you have to have disk from manufacture to install..

[remydrh]

We have thousands of procs running on XP 64-bit (basically a rebranded Server platform like mentioned) and it works fine. The biggest problem you may have is Backburner. It was not exceptionally stable for us.

Sounds like we're similar to DeepBlue's setup. Cheapo machine running the licenses. We built the blades, it saved us a lot of money that way and server parts are still 3 year warranty regardless.

A challenge will be finding a UPS system to handle the load.

[Erik N]

I do not reccomend Windows Server 2003 x64 for rendernodes. We had it, and had serious and rather iexplicable issues with Backburner. The server OS is actually not supported by Backburner (or Max for that matter) according to Autodesk documentation. We are now back to XP64 for the rendernodes and it works fine (Vista 64 on WS, Server 2003 64 on file server). As for Windows server 2008 i do not now - have not tried it, so our issue could have been that Server 2003 did not comply properly with Vista 64, but, nevertheless, I reccomend XP64 for rendernodes.

[MikeeMax]

i work on a daily basis with VISTA 64 and backburner/Vray
works like a charm.