The studio I’m working at purchased a professional krakatoa package a while back ( 2 workstation licenses & 10 rendering licenses ). We’ve also been fiddling with Deadline in freemode on the 2 workstations. However I’d like to know how do we use these 10 network licenses. Is there some other way of using them aside from purchasing deadline. Pardon the silly questions 
While we have no experience with Krakatoa and Backburner (for obvious reasons), there is nothing that prevents you from submitting a render job to Backburner.
The interactive licenses support 3ds Max in workstation mode where you can create particles and set up Krakatoa, while the network license is just for rendering and is thus cheaper. It simply allow a 3ds Max copy running in network mode (without the UI etc.) to get a license to either render or save particles.
For example, if you have a scene with particles you want to render, you would switch to Krakatoa as the renderer, then in the 3ds Max Render Setup dialog check “Net Render”, hit the Render button and send the scene to Backburner for rendering. When the network machines launch 3ds Max to render the scene, they will pull the network licenses from the license server and should render as expected.
Same applies to saving particles - set up Krakatoa to save particles to some network drive, then check Net Render and press Render and the scene will be sent to the network to save particles.
The only thing that Krakatoa does not support with Backburner is automatic Partitioning - you either have to save locally or submit to Deadline. It WOULD be possible on Backburner with the right amount of scripting, but we have no incentive to support that workflow because frankly we wrote Deadline because we disliked Backburner. 
Note that you have to set the registry of your network machines as described in the documentation for them to see the license server, otherwise there shouldn’t be anything special about the way to will run.
Yeah I totally forgot about backburner… Currently we are only using 3ds for VFX work on the show we’re doing ( we’re very maya centric here). Since we are primarily rendering with Krakatoa/scanline partioning across our 10 network nodes would be ideal as well. Ball park figures only how much is Deadline for our 10 nodes? If we decide to go the Dealine route I would need a lot of hand holding setting it up for Fumefx Simulations/partitioning/ rendering with scanline/krakatoa/occsasionally vray. Is it very difficult for somebody with no background in network rendering? I set up Deadline in free mode on my two workstations for partitioning and that wasn’t too bad. For simulation/rendering across more nodes I suspect is alot more complicated…I guess what I’m asking is, how patient is your Deadline support staff? 
The answer to this is: Ryan Russell is the most patient guy I have ever met. Combine that with the fact he is the senior developer of Deadline and should have the best support you have ever experienced from a software company. 
In Level 1 pricing (1-25 nodes), the price per node was $140 once + 35/year for support per node.
For 10 nodes, this would mean something like $1750. (but get a real quote from Thinkbox Sales dept. because this could have changed).
Just email ‘sales AT thinkboxsoftware DOT com’ and ask for an estimate.
I think there is also a way to rent licenses for a limited period of time, but I don’t know what the conditions are.
Managing Deadline jobs for rendering and saving is relatively easy, but there is of course some learning curve involved.
If you haven’t used Backburner (which not comes with Maya too), you’d better start with Deadline
Another thing to keep in mind - a Deadline node license covers all CPUs in the machine. With two free nodes and 8 cores per machine, you can possibly run up to 16 partitions in parallel for free (YMMV).
Krakatoa Partitioning Submission support the so-called “concurrent tasks” option of Deadline, so it can launch multiple copies of Max on the same render node and produce multiple partitions in parallel. Since Particle Flow is single-threaded, as long as you have enough memory to fit your PFlow particles, it should be much faster than saving one at a time. (Krakatoa itself does not load particles in memory when saving partitions).
Krakatoa itself is multi-threaded when rendering, so it will take advantage of all the cores it finds on a machine. Thus, doing concurrent tasks in render mode makes no sense. If you already paid for the Krakatoa render nodes, you could either spend some more money on Deadline licenses, or try to render with Backburner. But we cannot give you much support in the latter case because we don’t have a Backburner farm to test/debug issues…
So far we’re leaning towards deadline. Have you had much experience simulating FumeFX stuff with deadline? Is it fairly straight forward?
I personally don’t have enough experience.
In the early FumeFX 1.1 days, there were some issues with simulating on the network (although FumeFX has a special network option to run on Backburner and similar systems).
I have heard from other users that it is working well now. But it would be a good idea to try it out with your free trial of Deadline before you commit.
I hope that other users will jump in and comment here…