Renderfarm node cannot obtain license (OSX)

[braveRabbit]

I am currently trying to set up our renderfarm with vray and come across the issue that the render slaves cannot find the license, resulting in error 61.

As for the situation, I don't want to setup the farm for distributed rendering but rather have all nodes working on their own images.
The license for the farm resides on one workstation and should also serve the farm nodes - which should be no problem as I understand it. When submitting a job the slave starts vray standalone just fine but then ends with the license error.

I specified the location of the license server in advance with:

/Applications/Autodesk/maya2012/Maya.app/Contents/vray/bin/setvrlservice.exe -server=serverName

and running

/Applications/Autodesk/maya2012/Maya.app/Contents/vray/bin/setvrlservice.exe -dump

confirms that location has been set.

Also when opening a browser on the render node and searching for "http://serverName:30304" I get to the licensing page with all the license information. So, from that point everything seems to work fine.
Enabling or disabling the firewall doesn't make any difference.

Still I receive the license error on all render nodes.

If anyone could shed some light on the problem I would really appreciate it. Searching the forums gave no direct help as anyone only seems to be concerned with DR.

Cheers, Ingo

[Marti]

Please note that V-Ray license server settings should be also set per user. However, instead of setting it per every user you may use an environment variable . It is the VRAY_AUTH_CLIENT_FILE_PATH environment variable which points to the folder that contains the vrlclient.xml file with the V-Ray license server settings (IP address and port number). It must be set on the node machines. The vrlclient.xml on Mac Os X can be found in /Users/YOUR_USER/.ChaosGroup folder (please note that the folder is hidden).

[braveRabbit]

@Marti:
Thanks for the info and your help. It now runs perfectly. I wouldn't have figured that one out by myself. Cheers.

----------------------

So, finally the problem is solved and I just wanted to take the opportunity to write down the most important steps in case someone else stumbles across the same problem. All this licensing stuff can get very tricky and there are some things that are nowhere mentioned in any docs.

In order to get everything running on a renderfarm the following steps are necessary (this guide is mostly for OS X guys but I am sure it can be easily transferred to other platforms):

1. install VRay on all nodes. A full install is not necessary as the render clients are not using VRay in interactive mode anyway
2. during the installation register vrayslave as a service (thre machine needs to be restarted to make sure that the service definitely runs)
3. open Terminal and enter

Applications/Autodesk/maya2012/Maya.app/Contents/vray/bin/setvrlservice.exe -server=serverName

where serverName is the name of your computer or the IP address. In case of the computer name make sure that you add ".local" to the name, i.e. myMacBookPro.local. (this is somewhat OS X specific)
This adds the license server information that is needed for the client to find the license on the master machine. It's stored in a hidden file we are going to point to later.

4. still in Terminal enter

/Applications/Autodesk/maya2012/Maya.app/Contents/vray/bin/setvrlservice.exe -dump

to get the defined server information. The computer name or IP addressjust entered should be correctly listed here.

5. to make definitely sure that the client find the license on the server machine open a browser and type

http://serverName:30304

This should open the license information page on the master machine. If this page cannot be found make sure that the computers see each other on the network.

At this point everything should be working.
If you run a job from the command line on the client it should be rendering without a problem.

Another thing to note is that when running Terminal it's best to not use the modified Maya Terminal, as the shell script contains environment variables that might throw off VRay while looking for the license file. It even can lead to a crash of vray.exe.
The important variable is VRAY_AUTH_CLIENT_FILE_PATH and it's pointing to /Users/USERNAME/.ChaosGroup
This hidden file is containing the license server information that we set up earlier. If this file is not existent (not yet written) or cannot be found (due to the missing environment variable) the license server cannot be found and the rendering will be interrupted with error 61.

This was actually the main problem from the OP, because the renderfarm is managed through our proprietary render management software which was missing to define this important environment variable. After adding this the rendering started without any error and went straight through.

As a sidenote:
Our new renderfarm is setup in a regular IKEA Helmer cabinet. 6 Nodes with 81.6 GHz of renderpower and 96 GB of RAM running Maya, VRay and After Effects. We have a whole page dedicated to 'bunnyburg' which can be found on our blog.


Thanks again for the great support from Chaosgroup.

Cheers, Ingo

[Marti]

Thank you for sharing, Ingo!