I'm in the process of purchasing 5 licenses of Deadline and need advise on how to best utilize my computers. I will have a total of 5 computers in my network. There are 3 machines that can be dedicated to rendering full time, a main workstation that can be used to render at nights and weekends and a mobile workstation that can render during the day. I need the flexibility to use the main workstation as a render slave during heavy production.
Should one computer be designated as the Manager or can the Manager be launched from any of the computers in the network?
Will I be able to administer the network from a remote (off site) location using Remote Desk Top or does RDT only work through the Manager computer.
Sorry for the long post,
Thanks,
Buzz Chambers,
RTM Producitons, Inc.
Hi Buzz,
Sorry for the delayed reply.
Deadline doesn't have a 'Manager' application, in the sense that a central application divides the render jobs among the slaves. Instead, Deadline uses Windows File Sharing to manage the jobs (we call this the repository), and the slaves themselves determine which jobs to render.
We always recommend that the repository be installed on a Server OS, mainly for the reason that Windows 2000 and XP have a connection limitation of 10 machines. However in your case, you shouldn't run into this connection limitation if you install the repository on one of your slaves (which is what we would recommend). The repository should only be installed on one machine, and you shouldn't have any problems running the slave on the same machine that the repository is installed.
Adding your workstations to the farm isn't a problem. Deadline only renders when the slave application is running, so simply start the slave application on your workstations and you're good to go.
You also shouldn't have any problems RDT'ing into any of your machines on your farm. While Deadline integrates RDT into the Monitor application for convenience, it does not affect the use of RDT on any of your machines.
Hope I've been to answer all your questions. If you have any more, let us know!
Cheers,
- Ryan
Ryan,
Thanks for clearing that up. I'm sure to have a few more questions when I do the installation. I have my Deadline license but I'm still waiting on computers to arrive.
Thanks again,
Buzz