Limit groups and floating lics.

Deadline
1

Hi,



We got a bunch of floating licenses in today for Maya 8.0 Unlimited.



We also have several node locked licenses of Maya 8.0 for the 3D artists work stations, but we can not float extra licenses to work stations if we scale up the number of 3D people working.



What I’m trying to figure out is how would I configure the Maya8 pool in Deadline to include the extra floating licenses.



I figure I need to create a limit group for Maya8, but what about the node locked workstations. Should they be included in the limit group?



Let’s say I have 10 node locked workstations, and 10 floating lics. Do I set my limit group size to 20? or 10?



Maybe I set it to 10, but blacklist the artists work stations?





Mathew Foscarini

Technical Director

Crush, Inc.

Toronto

2

Hi Mathew,



I would create a Maya8 limit group of size 10 and blacklist the

workstation machines. This way, only your slaves will render, and thus

only floating licenses will be used. If you set the limit to 20 and

didn’t blacklist the workstations, nothing is preventing more than 10

slaves from rendering the job, so you would likely run into licensing

issues.



Cheers,

3

So if a slave is black listed in the limit group it is excluded from any jobs that use that limit group? Is that correct.



Also, I want to include the workstations because the artists don’t use them at night. But those workstations are node locked (because it’s cheaper to buy 10 node locked then 10 floating).



We also have an extra 10 floating licenses, but we have more render nodes then floating licenses. So I need to limit it.



Does this make sense? or is my setup here strange.



Mathew Foscarini

Technical Director

Crush, Inc.

Toronto

4

So if a slave is black listed in the limit group it is excluded from

any jobs that use that limit group? Is that correct.



Yes, that’s correct.





Also, I want to include the workstations because the artists don’t use

them at night. But those workstations are node

locked (because it’s cheaper to buy 10 node locked then 10 floating).



There isn’t an easy way to juggle floating and node locked licenses in

Deadline yet. A possible solution might be to have an Excluded slave

list for a limit group, in addition to the current black/whitelisted

slave list. Slaves added to this Excluded list would not require the

limit group when they go to render the job.



In this case, you would add your workstations to the excluded list

instead of the blacklist, and set the limit to 10. You would never have

more than 10 slave machine rendering (and therefore no more than 10

floating licenses being used), and your workstations would just ignore

the limit group because they don’t have to worry about licenses being

available (because they have node locked licenses).



Would this solution work for you? I can’t guarantee that it will make it

into the upcoming release, but definitely the release after.



Cheers,

5

Yea, I think that would work.



Still, I’m finding that there is no way for Deadline to give license priority to a slave (or I just can’t find it in the manual).



For example: My workstation is a new machine, and is faster then some of our older render nodes. We don’t have enough floating licenses to cover all the render nodes, and my workstation.



When I start my Deadline slave. I’d like one of the floating licenses to take priority on my machine. Because it’s faster.



Is this possible in Deadline, or a future version?



Sort of like the pool priority feature for slaves. Except this would be in the limit groups. So you could let people sort machines by their performance.



Mathew Foscarini

Technical Director

Crush, Inc.

Toronto

6

There isn’t a way to prioritize slaves based on their processor speed.

We’ve avoided this type of feature in the past for a couple of reasons:


  1. It did not work well with Deadline’s decentralized architecture. The

    slaves are not aware each others processor speed, so they can’t

    determine if they should hold off on a job because a faster slave is

    ready to search for jobs.


  2. A machine with a faster processor might not necessarily render

    faster. We ran into this situation where a batch of brand new dual

    opterons where rendering 3dsmax jobs slower than our old machines, but

    would render dfusion jobs faster as expected. Setting up priority based

    on processor speed in this case wouldn’t work.





    If you want to avoid rendering on certain machines, you can blacklist

    them in the limit groups or in the job’s machine limit. You could also

    create a Maya8Fast pool and only put your good machines in there if you

    have a job you want to push through quicker.



    Cheers,
7

Just a heads up that the excluded list for limit groups will make it

into the next release.



Cheers,