Help needed on setting up remote rendering over HTTP(S) only

Deadline
1

Hello everyone,
I’d like to raise a question on a, probably, very trivial topic I’m really struggling with. First of all, I’d like to highlight I’m total newbie with Deadline product and I am now trying to setup a proof of concept test for remote rendering. However, I couldn’t find overall solution which (at least partially) explains the configuration steps to be followed.

As shown in the diagram, I have two machines:

  • local workstation with DB&Repository, RCS and client installed
  • remote VM render with client installed

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My goal is to have all the rending process executed on the remote VM while connectivity between local and remote nodes is only over TCP/HTTP(S).

So far my understanding is that I need to:

  1. install local DB & Repository on local workstation
  2. install the client and run the RCS on local workstation
  3. install the client on remote VM

What is not clear is:

  1. Do I need remote connection server on the remote VM?
  2. Do I need to map network drives on remote VM or there is a smarter way for file transfer over the already established TCP/HTTPS connection?
  3. How do I get the rendered output images saved automatically in the Repository?

Any guidance for the overall steps I need to follow will be greatly appreciated :slight_smile:

Thank you in advance, I believe such solutions will greatly help new deployments in much bigger scale in future.

Regards,
Daniel

2

Hi Daniel,

I recently went through this myself… the docs aren’t great at orienting you…

  1. No, the RCS is only needed server side. All clients (worker, monitor, etc…) can specify to access the repository via a path or remote. You can specify this at the time of installation or modifiy the deadline.ini on the worker afterwards:

DeadlineClient-10.1.1.3-linux-x64-installer.run --mode unattended --connectiontype Remote --noguimode True r --launcherdaemon true --proxyrootdir <rcs_ip>: --proxycertificate --<path_to_your_pfx> enabletls true

2,3) AFAIK, the IO is left you to. Though there is an option to transfer the scene file, I don’t know if that works with remote connections. You could possibly use auxiliary files but I’ve never explored that.

One thing that really got me is the certificates. I suggest proofing the concept with HTTP to ensure everything else is working first. There are two sets of certificates; one for connecting directly to the DB and the other for the RCS. The RCS certificates can be generated when installing the DeadlineClient (not the repo). When prompted, say that you don’t have pre-existing certificates.

Hope that helps.

Jesse
Conductor Technologies

1 Like
3

@Jesse has good advice here!

Also, when you go to generate the certs for the Remote Connection Server, be sure to not accidentally put them in the same folder as the database certs. As the database has a CA cert, and the RCS has an identically named CA. And overwriting one with the other is a major pain in the neck.