Rendering farm?

[Scott Ehrlich]

I was actually thinking of a non VM farm - Windows on each node, with
the necessary apps installed as appropriate.

Scott

On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 7:37 PM, Richard Pieri <richard.pieri-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On Oct 9, 2009, at 6:39 PM, Scott Ehrlich wrote:
>> I received at least one email suggesting a Windows-based rendering
>> farm - likely to consist of a few rack systems all running 64-bit
>> Windows.  I read an article on Tomshardware which gave some decent
>> insight.   What can list participants offer on this concept?
>
> Virtualization is a nifty thing, and like every nifty thing it gets
> misused :).  Don't use it for your render farm.  Render farms are a
> lot like Beowulf clusters (and are sometimes set up *as* Beowulfs).
> They take big tasks and break them down into smaller pieces.  More
> nodes = more pieces = faster render times.  Virtualization is not a
> win in this environment because your host limits the number of
> concurrent VMs.  Virtualization is not a win because you want to be
> able to swap out a failed node as quickly as possible -- and that is
> neither easy nor fast if you have a hardware fault on the physical host.
>
> --Rich P.
>
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