We’ve just built a few render slaves based on i7 2600k processors and 16GB RAM on the Z68 chipset. Our plan is to install XP64 on these machines as we have a few spare licenses. However, I wondered what the alternatives are, if any, to installing XP. Is there a simpler, Linux-based solution (that is easy to install/manage)?
The slaves will sit on a Windows network and the main server runs Windows SB Server 2003. Our other render slaves (which are beginning to show their age) run XP64 and our workstations run Windows 7 ultimate.
We use the slaves to run distributed render jobs and backburner jobs, with backburner manager running on the server.