Hi, i would like to make a little render farm with 3 render nodes (q6600) 1 work station(q6600 also) and 1 File server(?). I need some help or advice for setting up the file server. I will use it for allocating all the maps, 3d blocks, hdri files, etc (It will be the out put footege), an for alocating files (input) like 3dmax files(projects), animations (Avi,quicktime,etc), fotograms(exrs, hdris,tiff,pngs,jpgs)etc. what type of hard discs y need for this, a single procesor will be fine? , how much for ram i will need, Do i need to setup raid for more speed and raid for buckup?.
Please aby advice will help.
Pd: Remember that this is for a small render farm i need somethig good,nice,and cheap.
I wouldn’t worry about raid for speed. Your network will probably be your bottleneck. Raid for backup is definitely important. I would spend the money on that. Core 2 Duo, 2 gigs of RAM shouldn’t set you back too much either. We’ve had good success running a Windows Server 2003 machine as a file server, backburner manager, and v-ray license server.
For Raid, I’m only familiar with RAID 0 (speed) RAID 1 (Mirroring) and RAID 5 (Both). Raid 0 and 1 take 2 drives each. Raid 5 takes 4 drives.
Raid 1 in conjunction with daily backups to either an external or tape drive is a good way to go for your critical project files.
Have you considered using Server 2003 as the OS on it?
That’s not really true. you can in theory up the limit but the server editions simply work differently. I cant really go into great detail (it does different memory handling for example. And the connection limit is not the only network problem with xp). But i can assure you that a switch from a xp manager to a 2k3 manager solved a whole lot of weird problems at once. Not even thinking about running an XP fileserver (shudder).
We’re using a Western Digital MyBook World Edition II with 2TB set as RAID 1 as a fileserver.
Unless you want to use your fileserver as job manager for Backburner for example, I’d certainly get a NAS solution. It’s cheap and easy to setup.
We have had a lot of good experiences with the Promise and 3ware raid cards. We run mostly RAID 50 (5+0) now but RAID 5 or 6 (Some new cards allow this) is highly recommended.
We have not used NAS devices before but I am sure the work well. You can also get CentOS, which is Red Hat Enterprise, but Open Source. Linux can be a it more complicated but it can definitely serve your drives.
Also make sure you get a good Gigabit Switch and a decent firewall/router to connect all of these together. The Dell switches are quite nice and affordable. I would avoid gigabit switches that seem to cheap, it’s like RAM if its to good to be true…
Advantages to setting up a windows sever, as have been mentioned, are:
- setting it up as a license server if needed
- Using it for BB Server
- Flexible Backup Options (We off load to Hard Drives and archive to tape)
- Remote access through VPN (If using windows sever)
These are just what I can think of, and believe me I am no windows advocate. But we run Max so we must use the doze.
