We have a small render farm. Not all machines are identical, though they are loosely based around i7 CPUs and either 16 or 32 GB RAM. Most use W7x64 but some use XPx64.
The latest machine I have built is an i7 with 32GB ram. Rendering through DR seems fine, but it always takes a moment or two to pick up. Initially, the vray dialog says ‘not responding’.
What should I look at to stop this? Firewalls are off.
Are all nodes connected using the same switch?
Check that they’re all connecting at 1gig
Also see that you didn’t connect one node to the uplink port on your switch
Yep - all the same switch and all 1gig. Not to worry - it does pickup after a minute or so. I can live with it.
Have you noticed if always the same machines failed to pick up the job or it is on a random basis ?
What about rendering a simple scene with a few primitives without any textures proxies and etc? Just increase the render-times by increasing Image Sampler subdivisions to get all machines connected to the job.
How many machines participate in the rendering ? What about if you use only half of them ?
Make sure that all machines have the same Vray/3DSMax and etc version installed.
What OS do you have on your server-machine - the one where the projects and assets are stored ?
Are the spawner’s started as a service or manually ?
As a service
The issue could be also related to the incoming connection limitation - I’ve just google W2003 Server about the default values and it seams that they are 5 which means if more than 5 machines are trying to access the same file simultaneously the file will be only available for the first 5 of them.