Virtualization Rendering

[prey1979]

Hello all,

It has been a very long time since I have posted on the vRay forums so hello! I am wondering if anyone out there has had any knowledge about running a render farm on network servers? The IT manager here at my firm is currently reorganizing and rebuilding our entire corporate server and network. I was discussing how we need to have all our machines in the firm have the ability to be accessed when people are not in the office as render nodes. That then moved the conversation to him suggesting visualization on our servers.

Is this possible? Theoretically its seems possible however would distributed rendering work? The type of renderings we do are architectural visualization so sometimes the scene files get very large and I feel that even with 128 gigs of ram available to the virtual machines it may cause performance degradation to not only rendering but also to the file servers etc.

If anyone has any thoughts on such setups it would be greatly appreciated to hear them.


Kind Regards

Ryan

[im.thatoneguy]

Most of our farm is virtualized. We saw about a 10-15% drop in performance per machine. The advantage is that I can completely image an entire block of machines from bare metal to rendering in about 15-20 minutes.

I haven't done any substantial testing though on running multiple VMs on the same hardware. I imagine performance penalties would be far less predictable. In a perfect world free of hardware limitations and virtualization penalties we would like to move to something like a private Azure or OpenStack cloud in which we can call up a render node that's tailored to the job.

Another thing to keep in mind is that unless you are using Nvidia's professional line of GPUs you can't virtualize your CUDA processing.

[prey1979]

Thank you so much for your input Gavin much appreciated!