Shut down my mongo VM and the monitor won’t open, is there a plan to host Mongo online? would that make it easier for people to use?
I almost setup a Postgresql account online so I could test out the stats gathering, I’m guessing MongoDB is doing a similar job.
My big concern is this will be a major stumbling block for customers expecting that Deadline ‘Out of the box’ experience which IMHO make Deadline so popular.
Don’t know if it would make things too slow but will it cause issues using an online service or VM Server?
What’s the best option for small facilities without the knowledge or resource for creating and maintaining db servers?
While the MongoDB database can be hosted online (ie: in the cloud), we won’t be doing the hosting ourselves. We expect users to host their own database in the same way they host their own server for the repository. For small studios, both can be run on the same machine. We are considering shipping the MongoDB binaries with our repository installer so simple installation. If we did, it would be optional, because power users will probably want to set up MongoDB themselves.
Stats gathering is not hooked up in Deadline 6 yet, and it’s likely we’ll just be storing this in MongoDB (since it’s a database). We still haven’t decided if we’ll be keeping the external Postgres option. If we just keep it all in MongoDB, it will be easier to setup, but the benefits of Postgres is that people familiar with sql can write their own queries.
We are more than happy to help with your MongoDB setup problems. For this one:
You’re referring to the Deadline Monitor right? I know you had issues running the Monitor on CentOS. Is this the same problem, or is it a different error message? Can you post the error you get?
to clarify on one point, we have considered a DOD approach [Deadline on Demand ] and are reviewing a variety of options at the moment
on-demand licensing for slaves [per hour, per partial hour etc] this would NOT supersede the ability to buy permanent license - in fact, purchasing permalicenses will always be cheaper than renting over the long hall.
on-demand licensing for server [likely a flat per week or per month fee to cover hosting costs + some markup]
please, everyone, feel free to chime in with YES WE WANT BOTH OF THOSE or which is the first order of interest.
and to further my view of the cloud - I want to promote what we are calling ‘hybrid rendering’ which is a local/remote/private cloud/cloud service setup which allows you to use all of your slaves, wherever they are as one logical farm. so at siggraph, we managed jobs, renders and output in WPG/Siggraph show floor in LA/ and on EC2 at the same time, same job, live. for real. it was stable, fast and it worked.
i’ll detail more about this later, and what my thoughts are - but give me your first feedback: do you LIKE the idea of managing disparate render slaves but they are yours to control? or would you prefer a closed [and therefore locked, inflexible] system?
I can’t see anyone wanting the second, which is why we are pushing for hybrid rendering. I think this is the future - use the machines you have, scale when you need - collaborate with other physical sites, don’t be chained into a platform or environment or cloud service…
Slave rentals would be good for us. Like you say it would be valuable to scale up to 200 EC2 nodes for a tight deadline but not have 200 deadline licenses on hand.
Maybe a flexibile purchase option that buys you a flat number of hours as opposed to seats. So you could look at our 25 deadline licenses as 25*24 hour license per day. But maybe we don’t need more than 5 for 3 weeks and then have a huge render job. So instead of buying 25 licenses we would buy one 250Kilorenderhours pack every year. And then if we need to scale up and down it could be more flexible.
Or maybe every render license comes with 100 hours of cloud time per year?
i’m thinking more like Skype - you put money in a bucket, and the time adds up. that way if you have 1000 nodes for 36 minutes it would be charged as 3600 minutes or 3600/60 = 60 billable hours. and as you get low on your bucket, it would notify you.
as for 100 online hours…yeesh…you guys and all your free stuff ;-0
I’m just thinking of you guys Chris! Encourage people to buy the ‘big package’ instead of nickle and diming you by only buying minutes as they need them.
By the way EC2 charges for a full hour. So it would be nice if Deadline helped you schedule your instance demands such that ideally you don’t waste time spooling up instances that are only needed for 20 minutes. Maybe after every task see if it’ll actually be needed for more than XX Minutes before the job completes?
In your example you would be charged by Amazon for 1,000 hours even though your render was only 600 hours of EC2 time. (You carried a zero wrong, 1,000 nodes * 36 min = 600 hours for Deadline rentals).
Just an update. In the next beta release, we will be shipping Mongo with the repository installer, and give you the option to connect to an existing Mongo instance, or to install a new one on the machine that you’re running the installer on. It will even set up the service on Windows and Linux automatically. I’m sure we’ll get the same working for OSX, when we start working on those installers.
Humh the instance licensing is tricky… Ideally I’d like to buy it once and have it, not to worry about buying extra hours in the middle of night. My vote goes towards some kind of stable, long instance licensing. If we could get an options to get 2for1 and so on its even better. With the demo version to we get any instances as standard standard? Like now we have 2 nodes, will we have like 2 nodes for instances?
] and are reviewing a variety of options at the moment
