moving from deadline 3 to 4 - 2 questions

Deadline
1

Hi guys,

We’re planning to move our farm from 3.1 to Deadline 4.0SP1 next week.
We have some 300 jobs left in the queue, we expect this
to render well into the end of May.
I have 2 questions that need to be addressed before I can
start deploying the slaves for 4.0

  1. Is it possible to transfer the current job queue from 3 to 4?
    We’ll be starting test renders for a new production as soon
    as 4 is up and running.

  2. Is it possible to seperate the storage of submitted scene files
    from the actual repository info(jobs, logs, reports, status etc.)?
    If so, how do we go about it and what are the caveats?

Thanks!

Dennis

2

Hey Dennis,

  1. Deadline 3 and 4 repositories are not entirely compatible, so what we recommend is to do a gradual migration to Deadline 4. Install a new Deadline 4 repository (which is required anyways), and add a few v4 clients to it for testing to make sure everything is working. Then add more slaves once you’re ready to use it in production. All new jobs should be submitted to the v4 repository, and as the v3 jobs start to finish up, you can migrate more slaves over to v4. This is the procedure we followed here when we migrated in the middle of production.

  2. One way to do this is to not submit your scene files with the job (this option is available for all applications that Deadline supports). This will keep the scene files off the repository, but will require that they be on the network somewhere else because the slaves will be accessing them directly. Another approach would be to implement this on the file system’s end (ie: DFS). We do this here as well, so while the repository looks like a single location, the jobs folder is actually on a different server under the hood then the rest of the repository.

Cheers,

  • Ryan
3

Gradual migration it is then (too bad).
Great idea about DFS, I’ll take a look at it during testing.

Thanks!
Dennis

4

Can we keep Deadline 3 and 4 clients on the slaves for backward compatibility with legacy files,
or maybe install the deadline 4 client and have them switch between repositories as needed?

5

Deadline 3 and 4 clients can exist on the same machine, but note that the Deadline bin path needs to be in the PATH environment variable. So whichever path appears first, that will be the “active” deadline version. I’m sure it would be straightforward to whip up a simple batch file or script to swap the bin folder in PATH to switch between the two versions.

Cheers,

  • Ryan