Network Render on Virtual Machines

Started by mattjgerard, June 06, 2017, 06:02:31 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

mattjgerard

How does network rendering work with virtual machines? I am talking to my IT person and trying to figure out what hardware we have available to us, and he is telling me we have 3 virtual machines with 4 processors each that he can split into any number of cores we want. I know very little about virtual machines. I know I need to get more info from the IT person, but am having issues getting him to understand how the licensing works. If each machine physically has 4 processors, I need to know how many cores they have as well, right?

Lets just say the base physical machine has 4 procs with 4 cores each = 16 total cores. No hyper threading at this point. Now, running a virtual machine he says he can present the VM with whatever number of cores we want. Well, if I get the same performance no matter if he programs the VM to present 16 cores or 64 cores, there's no reason to pay for the 64 core network render license, correct?

Guessing these are running off Linux servers or something, just virtualization machines for different needs in the company.

So, does the network render work with virtual machines or does it need to run natively? Very confused here.

3D Off the Page

I think what he meant by "he can split into any number of cores we want" isn't that you can just pick any number and create cores.  What he means is that if your machine has 16 total cores you can create vm's with any combination equaling 16 cores.  So 16 - 1 core machines, 8 - 2 core machines or 4 -4 core machines.  You can't decide that you want 64 cores and the 16 cores are multiplied.  You also need to have sufficient ram for each of the vm's as well.

http://www.virtualizationsoftware.com/virtual-cores-virtual-sockets-vcpu-explained/

Hope that makes sense.

mattjgerard

Thank you, that helps. Our IT dept is quite cryptic, and as such can be, well, interesting to deal with and pull information from. I have a meeting with them and want to enter it with as much info as possible.

Thanks for the link, I will make it my lunch break reading:)

mattjgerard

OK, had our meeting with IT and really didn't clear much up. They are running everything via virtualization, and they keep stating that they can present however many cores  to the VM's as we want. Unfortunately the server specialist wasn't there, so we didn't get his input on what the actual hardware looks like.

My logical brain is telling me that I need to request a 1:1 core count, as in I need 1 physical core represented in the VM for every physical core they have and will let us use.  Splitting 1 physical core into 2 virtual cores isn't making it twice as fast, its just doubling our licensing costs. But as for the virtualization side of things, I don't know if they can assign a VM to use specific cores, or if the VM  back end software pools all the cores and hides that from the VM. Ugh. Makes me wish I paid ore attention to all my network nerd friends when got to talkin shop.

I have a call into support to ask them questions, so we will see what crops up from there.