I am new to Deadline & to this forum, so hopefully I am informative with my questions. I am an IT manager for a media company. We have a 20 node, Maya render farm running in conjunction with a Vray engine. The hardware is from Boxx Technologies with 12Gbs of RAM for each node & running Windows Server 2008 in terms of a operating system. Also, I am running Deadline 4.0 to render-wrangle the farm.
We’ve began early testing to see if we can use the farm to render compositions for our After Effects team. Installed on five nodes is the render portion of After Effects, Deadline submission is all setup via the program itself & the test files are simple comps with fonts, plugins, etc & they were pushed out to the farm. I arrived the next morning & saw that nothing was rendered. After some investigation with another IT cohort, we realized that the nodes are being pegged at 99% CPU usage due to the satellite function of Vray.
My understanding of the Vray satellite is that it’s useful for distributing single image renders - like if you were going to do a high DPI image for print. Vray sends out image tiles to Vray clients for computation. You can’t corral it with a farm directly since Vray itself has to distribute the tiles to the other nodes. The best you can do is to make one node a “Vray master” and then send tile render jobs to that guy. The catch is - you need to lock the other nodes because deadline won’t know that they’re busy with a job.
So, my question is is this a viable solution? If am correct, this would section off those five nodes for my AE users, but my CG users would be using five nodes due to Vray not working well with After Effects. is there any way to have my AE comps working with a Vray environment. Thank you.
We’ve had many discussions about DR in the past, and as you’ve discovered, the problem always boils down to finding a way for Deadline to know that the nodes it is running on are being used in a DR render so that it doesn’t pick up other jobs. The best way to do this is for Deadline to explicitly control the vray satellite process (ie: starting it when it is needed and shutting it down when it is not). We’ve just started discussions with Vlado at VRay about finding a way to do this.
Honestly, the best solution now would be to keep those 5 nodes dedicated to vray satellite renders, and setup 5 machines from your Maya nodes to also render After Effects jobs. That way, you guarantee that no Deadline renders will interfere with vray satellite renders, or vice versa. By using pools, you could have those 5 AE machines prefer AE jobs, but then move on to Maya jobs when there are no AE jobs left (thus keeping the machines busy, regardless of what types of jobs are in the queue). See this documentation for more information on pools: software.primefocusworld.com/sof … groups.php
Thanks for the response. I was afraid you were going to recommend the solution of dedicated AE & Maya nodes knowing it would be the only way currently, but I had to double check. Thanks again.
I know it has been awhile since we last talked, but I wanted to ask how has the discussions with Vlado at VRay been in regards to Vray satellite accepting other jobs? Thanks.
There haven’t been any discussions for a little while. They have to implement some things on the vray end in order to properly support DR with Deadline, so we’re essentially waiting for those changes to be made.
Thanks Ryan. We are gearing up to submit non-Maya jobs (After Effects, Cinema 4D, Nuke, etc) to our farm, so your previous suggesting of dedicating certain nodes to them, to avoid the Vray satellite, will probably be our solution. Thanks for the followup.