We’re looking into utilizing Amazon EC2 to expand our render farm for short periods of time. I was hoping that someone out there might have some experience setting one of these up and interfacing it with Deadline. I guess my biggest question is how does Deadline handle launching jobs to these virtual machines (specifically getting files from my network to the EC2 machines) and can the files be written to my network from the virtual machines?
James
Hey James!
I’m our resident expert on the subject. Not that I’m fantastic, just that I have the most experience. 
Asset syncing is the number one issue with an augmented farm. We’ve gone about it two different ways, and they’ve worked well in our testing.
The first is to use a public file syncing service like Box or DropBox. These automatically copy changed assets between local and remote farms. The other option is to use something like FTP or Aspera and have it be a manual process. In both of these scenarios, there is an asset store up in EC2 (just a machine with a big virtual disk), and the applications the remote Slaves start will store and access their resources from that machine. Deadline 6.1 will have the ability to check for assets before starting a job (we call these asset dependencies) so that rendering won’t happen until everything needed for the particular job is synced.
Slaves communicate back to the central Repository/DB/license servers in the home office by some manner of virtual private network. We have documentation on how to set this up with OpenVPN, but there are hardware solutions out there too. It’s also possible to create a farm completely split off from the main office with its own Repository and license server, the requirement there is that shuttling jobs between the two is more of a manual situation.
It’s a somewhat complex situation, but I should be able to help.
Hey Edwin!
Thanks for the info. It does indeed sound complex. My first thought was to recreate our directory setup in our EC2 network. That way we can just copy the files to the similar directories on the master machine and we wouldn’t have to change any file paths. But it still sounds like we will have to launch jobs from those virtual machines? This is still a little unclear so I’d like to chat with you about it on the phone. How long will you be in the office today?
James
Hi James,
We also have a new extension for Deadline called VMX that deals specifically with managing virtual machines on cloud solutions like Amazon, Azure, OpenStack, etc. You can work with clouds without VMX, but VMX adds extensive control, balancing, and automation features. Check out this video on YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=pmM_8hsJt0E
VMX is not yet released, but if you would like to become a tester for VMX, just shoot me a private message on the board or e-mail me directly at jamescoulter(at)thinkboxsoftware(dot)com .
Hi James, that looks really awesome. I’d love to be a tester and I’d also like to get in on the 6.1 beta. I’m curious how close 6.1 is to release though. I’m tempted to upgrade my studio up to 6.1 now just so we can access the expanded cloud services. If that’s not recommended then I probably could just create a beta farm.
I’m in kind of a rush though as we have a show that needs to be done ASAP. I’m exploring Amazons EC2 as a solution but I’m not sure the setup time will be ideal for this particular project. But it is definitely an interest to us long term. I’d like to give you guys a ring tomorrow and have a chat with Edwin about this in more depth.
James
Sure thing. I’m in the office until 5:00pm central today, so you can give me a call anytime.
Dial 2 for support and whoever picks up can redirect you to me.
6.1 beta has been quite stable for us. I wouldn’t be too worried about rolling it out in production.
I have a question that I forgot to ask Edwin this morning. How does one go about installing Deadline on the Amazon instances? Do I have to set up another license server within the virtual environment or is there a way to connect it to our internal license server. Normally I’d go through my IT department but they don’t seem to know if it’s possible.
i get licenses from the VPN all the time and did so in production frequently when we were ‘on the lot’ for pre-vis etc.
currently i run openvpn and connect to thinkbox offices and point the license at the path i’m given [which is the machine in the office]
traffic should be small.
cb
Yeah we just did that here. The only problem we ran across was connecting to the Repository. Currently the path to the Repository is this:
\renderfarm\DeadlineRepository6
But on the Amazon instance we have to use the IP address rather than the name. This created a conflict and the slave wouldn’t launch. I’m hoping that switching to the 6.1 beta might clear this up.
Either way, setting this up is kind of a pain. I think it would be great if the Thinkbox guys put together a tutorial for setting up an Amazon EC2 farm using Deadline…given that they have the time. 
Hello James,
I figured another official voice in this thread is good to have. If you are connecting remotely for your EC2 instances, you would want to make sure your dbConnect.xml has an addition to note the machine that those EC2 machines would see the db machine as. Under hostname in that file, a semi colon separated entry with both remote and local addresses would work. For example:
server;196.168.0.1
This would have any machine trying to connect to try the machine with the hostname server first, and then the IP address second. You can also do something like:
dbserve;dbserve.home.network.com
which is a hypothetical local, then remote dns entry for the machine. Hope that helps.
Cheers,
That’s really good to know Dwight thanks!
We have a white paper that describes the essential steps. (I sent it to you yesterday as an e-mail attachment.) The white paper is still rather new and is undergoing revisions, so we’ve not posted it publicly. It is available to VMX testers via the forum and to others upon request.
Actually Dwight, I thought I knew where the dbConnect.xml lives but I wasn’t able to locate it. Could you tell me the location?
Yes! I just saw it thanks! I’m going to dive into that right now.
The dbConnect.xml file can be found under the “settings” folder in the root of the Repository.
Got it. Thanks Edwin!
So I edited the xml file. But when I went to install Deadline on the Amazon VM it wasn’t recognizing the path to the Repository.
\192.102.10.29\DeadlineRepository6
I can connect to the directory through the VPN, but when I try to move forward with installation it just rejects the bath saying the directory doesn’t exist.
I’m trying to follow the white sheet that James gave me but it doesn’t offer much help on this problem.
James
We might have to hack this a bit if the installer is having problems. I haven’t had any issues with this yet, but that’s going to be what I play with on Monday. I’ve never had problems with UNC paths in the installer, but I’ll see what’s what on our EC2 test farm.
You can move forward with the install by specifying a bogus directory (“C:” for example), then specify the network path in the Monitor once the thing is set up.
OK, that worked for now as I got through the install process…well mostly. The service install didn’t work but it mentioned in the PDF that this might happen… I’m going to talk with my IT guy once he gets back. I noticed that when we tried installing Deadline on our Macs we had a similar issue with them not seeing the repository. We had to mount the paths to get them to see it.