From: "Abraham Schneider" <aschneider@(email surpressed)>
Subject: How to treat limited render software licenses?
   Date: Tue, 16 Mar 2010 11:20:17 -0400
Msg# 1928
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Hi!
Sorry, maybe this is a stupid question, but until now we only had Shake and unlimited render licenses, so I haven't had this problem:
how do I manage a limited number of render licenses of my production software (in my case: Nuke) without restricting myself too much in the hosts file?
What I'd like to do: install Nuke on as many machines (renderfarm and user workstations) as possible. Add a +nuke group in the hosts file to all these machines that have nuke on it. Then I'd like to submit my nuke scripts with '+nuke=x@100' where x is the number of render licenses that I bought.
All this works fine as long as there is only one render job on the farm. But after submitting a second job, this one will start on another x machines, which obviously will fail because I don't have enough render licenses.
One solution would be to only add x machines to the +nuke group in my hosts file so I do a hard limit on the machines. That's what I'm doing at the moment with our plugins like Furnace, Sapphire, etc. There I have only 2 render licenses or so, so it is easy to maintain the hosts file if a machine dies or something like this. But to manage this for 10, 20 or more render licenses (but less render licenses than available render machines!) would be really problematic, especially because I have many workstations that are only part time online in rush if a user is away from his machine.
So is there a better way to deal with this whole license problem and I just haven't found it in the manual, or do I have to do this with the number of machines I'd assign to a group? 

Thanks in advance,

Abraham

Abraham Schneider
Senior VFX Compositor


ARRI Film & TV Services GmbH
Tuerkenstr. 89
D-80799 Muenchen / Germany

Phone (Tel# suppressed) 

EMail aschneider@(email surpressed)
www.arri.de/filmtv

Sitz: München   Registergericht: Amtsgericht München
Handelsregisternummer: HRB 69396
Geschäftsführer: Franz Kraus; Dr. Martin Prillmann; Thomas Till


   From: 
Subject: Re: How to treat limited render software licenses?
   Date: Tue, 27 Apr 2010 16:52:29 -0400
Msg# 1932
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On 2010-03-16 08:20:17 -0700, "Abraham Schneider" <aschneider@(email surpressed)> said:
Sorry, maybe this is a stupid question, but until now we only had Shake and unlimited render licenses, so I haven't had this problem: 

Everyone moving from Shake to Nuke has run into this same issue.
how do I manage a limited number of render licenses of my production software (in my case: Nuke) without restricting myself too much in the hosts file?
Buy more Nuke render licenses, render on fewer machines, or define fewer CPUs per workstation in your host file.
What I'd like to do: install Nuke on as many machines (renderfarm and user workstations) as possible. Add a +nuke group in the hosts file to all these machines that have nuke on it. Then I'd like to submit my nuke scripts with '+nuke=x@100' where x is the number of render licenses that I bought.
We used to define an 8-core Xserve as having 4 CPUs in the host file, but when switching to Nuke from Shake we ran into the problem of not having enough render licenses. To solve the problem temporarily we redefined the workstations as having 1 CPU instead of 4 and bumped up the threads and memory count in Nuke to maximise its use. It works well for certain Nuke jobs (with a lot of 3D rendering) but not all Nuke jobs. In the end we were tired of rush "licpause" errors and bought a lot more Nuke render licenses and redefined the render nodes to have 4 CPUs again. Works best, for the most part. 

:)

Mat X
The Embassy VFX