Hi,
I have a deadline farm running deadline 6 and nuke 7.0v8 on it. The farm is made up of both user workstations and dedicated machines. I’m trying to get these user workstations to render nuke in interactive mode only but the dedicated machines to render nuke in render mode only. What I mean is that if I have a nuke job on the deadline farm, if it goes to the workstation machine, it’ll render in interactive mode (i.e. -i in command line) but if it goes to a dedicated machine it’ll render normally as it does right now. Is there a way to do this in deadline? is possible to do this in deadline but requires some coding?
Thanks for any help
Cheers
Hi,
If you go to “monitor” > “login as super user” > “configure plugins” > “nuke” and scroll to the bottom, you can enter a comma separated list of slave names which will be told to pull an interactive license instead of a render node license:
slave001,slave002,slave003
Cheers,
Mike
Hi,
I didnt see that. Thanks. that looks like what I’m looking for.
Im also wondering if a similar system can be implemented:
For nuke jobs, if it is using all of the render licenses, use an interactive license instead regardless of farm machine. Is it possible to do this in deadline ?
I have a small simple script that does an lmstat to get if all the render licenses are being used or not but is it possible to “intercept” the nuke job in deadline with this and if it is out of render license and there are spare interactive license, to use the interactive license instead.
Thanks again
Hi,
There isn’t anything to really support this fully in Deadline at the moment. There are quite a few edge cases / reliability issues which this would raise and therefore need to be solved along the way. For example, if your farm starts taking all your interactive licenses, then your artists on their workstations will be unable to grab a license and do work. Repeatedly calling/executing of the -lmstat command has been known to lock up flexlm license server daemons, so reliability is an issue here, depending on the flexlm daemon version / OS platform you may be running. The Foundry have also now EOL the flexlm system for themselves, so we would need to look towards supporting RLM as well in the future which works similarly but is different! I think this is something to put on the wishlist as it has been asked for quite a few times before. However, it’s got a lot of potential ‘gotcha’s’ and may be almost impossible to achieve something which covers all the bases or at least enough to make it worthwhile/useful.
Mike
Hi,
Thanks for the reply but I was thinking that the script could be extended to only pool (and take interactive licenses during off-peak times) but I can see how constantly pooling the lmstat can be a bad idea/thing.
Anyway, thanks again for the help
You could do this. But you would need to be on a similar system to our Deadline setup which relies heavily on power management to aggressively manage machines (or else a bunch of extra Deadline Slave licenses). Create some new render nodes that are only a member of a new pool called something like Nuke_InteractiveSlaves. And what you can do in 6.1 is setup a secondary Pool in deadline which only renders Nuke jobs and add them to the “interactive license list”. Create a separate limit group like Nuke_i in addition to a Nuke_r and assign the two limit groups. This is way easier than trying to manually add and remove slaves from the Interactive list.