Render Farm Node Cluster Schemes (DR + Backburner)

[isoparmesan]

So, I'm looking out outlining a new render farm setup for the team I work on. Currently We have 7 Mac Pros (each with 12-core Xeons). When working on lookdev or individual frames, I use the regular V-Ray DR, and for Batch Rendering Animations I use Backburner to distribute the jobs.

The Mac Pros are the old tower style and take up a ton of space so my boss wants me to figure out something more space effective. We prefer to use macs as we all work on them, and mixing OS's causes a ton of headaches. That being said, I know there are farm setups where multiple OS's are possible, and that's not out of the question here, but I'll try to avoid it if possible.

So, The nice thing about using those Mac Pros is that with hyper threading, they can render 24 buckets at a time. If we were to switch to physically smaller machines (that also have fewer cores), DR renders would still be fine so long as the number of cores and their speeds were comparable to the Mac Pros. However, individual frame times for jobs rendered on Backburner would go through the roof.

So, I'm wondering if there's a way to set up "clusters" of machines with hyper threaded dual core processors (looking at mac minis). So, when you do DR, it uses all the machines like normal, but when you use Backburner each frame gets split up by a cluster.

I feel like I've seen descriptions of this type of farm, but I'm wondering if it's possible with Vray3/Maya 2016/Backburner/MacOS

I'm open to other solutions as well, and am curious to know what other farm setups some users here use.

[Svetlozar Draganov]

Would you please specify what exactly do you mean by split up by cluster?
Are you trying to render with BB and DR or BB only?

[isoparmesan]

I'm wondering if there's a way to utilize DR while using back burner. So instead of one frame being rendered by one node, a frame could be split up by a cluster of nodes. So, there could be multiple clusters with each one splitting up a single frame of an animation.

Is this possible?

[Zdravko.Keremidchiev]

Yes, this is possible. In this scenario you need to set the scene with the DR option enabled and all the machines IPs in the DR list. Then send the render through BB to one machine only. This way the BB will distribute portions of the frame to the rest of the machines and it will continue on to the next frame as soon as the nodes are done rendering.