Swarm Issues

[jeff_irish]

We have a bunch of Sketchup users on V-Ray using Swarm for rendering and also several people using V-Ray with 3ds Max. The number of people with Swarm installed exceeds the number of render nodes we have. What's happening is that when a Swarm user is rendering all of the nodes are being used up and the 3ds Max folks then can't render locally or use IPR. This is a big problem. Is it possible to limit the number of render node licenses the Swarm is allowed to use at any one time without limiting the number of people who can use it? If there was some sort of setting that specified the maximum number of swarm machines that could participate in any active render so that there were always a few render nodes in reserve that would solve the issue. We have 11 render nodes and 15 Sketchup users. All 15 of those users need to be able to use the Swarm but we never need 11 machines to contribute to a render.

The Max and Sketchup licenses used to belong to separate pools but now they're all "V-Ray Universal" and all drawing from the same pool and it's causing big problems. An alternate solve would be a way to segregate the render nodes needed by the Max people so they could never be occupied by the Swarm. Short of creating a separate account and buying more render nodes is there a way to fix this?

[konstantin_chaos]

Hi jeff_irish,

First, which versions of V-Ray and Swarm are you currently using?
There are key differences between Swarm in V-Ray 6 and in V-Ray 7 and later, though I don’t believe the management feature you’re looking for is present in either version.

One way to control machine usage is by disabling Swarm on specific machines that you want to reserve for 3ds Max rendering. This can be done through the Swarm configuration panel, either locally or remotely. Currently, there are no administrator privileges required - any user can make these changes.

Another option is to use Swarm tags to group machines and filter which ones are available for rendering. However, the user starting the distributed render must manually select a tag; otherwise, all available machines will be used.

It’s important to note that Swarm’s primary role is to provide a list of IPs for distributed rendering - it does not manage the license pool. Each machine attempts to acquire a render license independently, and licenses are not platform-specific. For example, a SketchUp instance can use a Max render license and vice versa.

A system could be developed to limit the maximum number of concurrent machines used by Swarm, but the challenge is deciding who enforces this limit. If it’s up to the submitter, it won’t prevent others from launching renders simultaneously and using additional machines. If the restriction applies to the entire pool, an administrator role might be required.

We’ll discuss this workflow internally, and I’ll provide more details once we’ve reviewed the possible solutions.

Regards,
Konstantin

[jeff_irish]

Thanks for the response. We're using the latest versions of V-Ray and Swarm. We have it set up so that machines are only used to contribute to a render when their CPU usage is below a certain threshold. If there was a feature to limit the number of machines that can contribute to a render, I imagine that it would just look at the list of machines in the swarm and grab those with the most resources available up to the max number of machines allowed. If we use tags, then it will always be the same users having an extra burden put on their computer rather than those with the most resources to spare at the time.