Damo Posted August 5, 2015 Share Posted August 5, 2015 Hi, I want to setup a small render farm in the garage. I've successfully setup up a tiny one with 2 machines (windows) which has given me the confidence to continue. I don't need or want to spend megabucks on hardware. eBay has a lot of cheap Xeon workstations and servers which I could buy and setup, however some are old and may not support a newer operating system. (They may, but you never know) I know the recommended Houdini os is win7 onwards, but what is the minimum os requirement for a render farm client running client and mantra renders? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lukeiamyourfather Posted August 6, 2015 Share Posted August 6, 2015 Windows 7 is the oldest version of Windows supported by current versions of Houdini. It might not sound that old but Windows 7 is over six years old at this point which is practically forever for software. Houdini runs great on Linux if you don't want to shell out the money for the Windows licenses and old server hardware will definitely be supported on modern Linux distributions. Unrelated to Houdini and operating systems, those old machines on eBay might be a lot of bang for the buck performance wise but they will be loud and power hungry. A friend of mine recently bought a bunch of quad socket servers with 12 cores for like $500 each. Seems like a good deal until you realize they draw 1,500 watts (compared to 400 to 500 watts from the modern equivalent). Add cooling costs on top of that and it's easy to run up an electrical bills in the hundreds or even thousands of dollars. Rendering for a month with that old quad socket machine costs approximately $100 per machine if you don't include the air conditioning costs in a hot climate. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Damo Posted August 6, 2015 Author Share Posted August 6, 2015 Thanks for your reply and advise. I didn't consider the power consumption, but I suspect I'll have to suck it up in the short term and replace with more economical machines as time goes on. I'd love to use Linux, but I know next to nothing about how to set it up (even simple things like shares or navigation of the file structure). If there was a step by step guide for dummies (better then the sidefx instructions) I may give it a go. Many thanks Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lukeiamyourfather Posted August 6, 2015 Share Posted August 6, 2015 I'd love to use Linux, but I know next to nothing about how to set it up (even simple things like shares or navigation of the file structure). If there was a step by step guide for dummies (better then the sidefx instructions) I may give it a go. Shameless self plug, I did a tutorial video on setting up Linux with a focus for CG and VFX. https://cmivfx.com/store/480-linux+for+vfx+and+cg+production+environments It doesn't cover setting up HQueue though. It's definitely worthwhile to learn Linux for this kind if there's time in your schedule to do it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Damo Posted August 8, 2015 Author Share Posted August 8, 2015 Thanks Luke. I'm downloading a copy of Ubuntu now, I'll install it on a VM and see how I get on. (I might need to purchase your tut) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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