Rendering farm?

[Richard Pieri]

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.