We are currently evaluating Deadline for our renderfarm after a look at all the render manager solutions out there and firstly can I say how great Deadline is
It seems to do everything we have wanted a render manager to do and tbh we really should have made this move earlier, what has prompted me this time are the ever rising energy costs and deadlines ability to manage these costs for our 35 machine render farm. Judging by our energy bills we estimate we will save the cost of Deadline in under 6 months
However I have a few queries/suggestions for Power Management, tell me if these can already be achieved.
Is it possible to specify the machine startup order in Wake on Lan, i.e. we would prefer the fastest machines to be woken first.
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The interval wake up is a little confused, is it number of machines being woken or the interval between which machines are woken.
—Ideallly the number of machines needed to service the jobs would be started in quick succession (10 seconds or so) and then others if required.
—It would be nice to specify the interval period if the WOL settings refer to machine numbers, and allow time in seconds
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It would be great if in the idle shutdown section you could specify different rules and schedules for diffent machines or machine groups
Just a few suggestions that would really make the Power Management features shine, and help promote what I see as one of the primary selling points of moving away from rickety old Backburner
Thanks for the kind words! I should note that my answers below are regarding Deadline 3.0:
[*]Is it possible to specify the machine startup order in Wake on Lan, i.e. we would prefer the fastest machines to be woken first.
This isn’t possible at the moment. Currently, the list is processed in alphabetical order, so for now you could have your fastest machines start with ‘A’. That is a good idea though, and it would probably just be a matter of allowing one to reorder the slave names in the enabled list. We’ll mark this down as a feature request.
[*]The interval wake up is a little confused, is it number of machines being woken or the interval between which machines are woken.
It’s the number of machines that are woken up per interval. The interval itself can be configured in the Repository Options in Monitor, under the Pulse Settings. The default interval is 300 seconds (5 minutes). Note that this interval is for all power management features, not just WOL.
[*]It would be great if in the idle shutdown section you could specify different rules and schedules for diffent machines or machine groups
That could come in handy. We’ve added this as a feature request as well.
btw: in Deadline 3.0 SP1 the WakeOnLan does not work in alphabetical order, or at least not in order of the machine name. When I submitted a job for 7 machines, not Render01 to Render07 woke up, but Render11, Render01, Render26, Render16, render06, Render22 and Render17. I have no clue why… all machines are in the same pools, same plugins etc…
The next release won’t be until the new year (likely February or March). We’re concentrating the majority of our resources on the Mac OS X version, so there is no guarantee that these changes will make it into the next release. They are still on the wish list though, so we haven’t forgotten about them. Unfortunately, I was wrong about the wake on lan working in alphabetical order. Deadline groups the slaves based on pool and group when determining which slaves to wake up, so the slave names end up in an arbitrary order.
This feature is still on our list, although we still don’t have an ETA yet. We may be looking at overhauling our Power Management for the next major release of Deadline (4.0), so that would be a good time to look at this feature specifically.
We are planning to do a 3.1 SP1 release very soon, and after that, we will probably be focusing the majority of resources on the next major version.
