Q: Rollout and management of network rendering

[ddit]

Hi,

Having just purchased network rendering, I am investigating the best way to roll it out automatically to many workstations and how best to manage those workstations going forward.

Specifically, I would like to know:

• Is there an unattended method to run the installation, install the slave service and start the service?
• How/Where are the workstation settings stored? Registry? Ini file? - I'm wondering if I can manipulate this via login script, registry, GPO, etc
• [more of a recommendation...] The scheduling is helpful, but having the ability to also choose the number of cores within the scheduling would be really helpful (ie all cores between 7pm-7am, [all, half, quarter, 1] core(s) during working hours etc)

Thanks in advance.

[guest84672]

Please contact support@luxion.com. They will be able to help you.

[ddit]

I have followed up with support and I am posting my finding here to help others who might ask the same question.

Unattended install is possible with these instructions. https://luxion.atlassian.net/wiki/display/K6NR/Silent+Installation. Following this guide, we are deploying using the options below in a batch file, which is set as a Computer 'Startup Script' within a Group Policy object - doing this allows it to truly run unattended. If the batch file is launched whilst a user is logged in then Windows UAC gets in the way.

Code Select Expand

keyshot6_network_setup.exe /S /ALLUSERS


However, this does not install the Slave service, so we follow it with the command below...

Code Select Expand

sc create "Keyshot6 Render Slave" binpath="C:\Program Files\KeyShot6 Network Rendering\keyshot6_network_slave_watchdog.exe" type=interact type=own start=auto


However, this only installs the service, it now needs to be started, so...

Code Select Expand

net start "Keyshot6 Render Slave"


The Slave service is now running and will get detected automatically by the Master. However, we cannot control how many cores will be used. The basic settings are stored in C:\Users\Public\Documents\KeyShot 6 Network Resources\settings.ini

[slave]
slave=true
ip=
port=4778
slavePriority=-10
allowedCores=0
launchSlaveTray=true

I believe "allowedCores=0" actually means all cores, but cannot confirm that. Here you can specify how many cores to use, but you probably need to know how many the workstation has to begin with as you may only want to allocate, say, 6 of 8 cores. You can probably do this from Group Policy if you are on an Active Directory domain, using item-level targeting to copy pre-set settings.ini files to different workstations that match a certain WMI query.

Within the settings.ini you can also choose whether the Tray application starts at login. If you set this to 'false' the Tray will not load and the Slave service will work as set in the settings.ini file. If the Tray application is set to start at login it overrides the settings.ini, meaning users have a quick and easy way of adjusting the number of cores on the fly.

There are a few problems with this however. Firstly, when the tray launches, it is set to user all cores, which may not be desirable if your users don't want to cripple their own machine whilst running a network render. Also, the option to "use all cores on sign out" is really helpful to others on the network, but is turned off by default.

The two drawbacks above can be solved by user education, but it would be helpful to have these options centrally administered and built into the Scheduler. If you are using dedicated workstations in a render farm, then you'll probably just run the Tray, set the options and never need to visit it again. Having the options centrally administered would be particularly helpful in setups where there are lots of user workstations to configure at once.