As I was surfing around doing my competitive homework, I came across a nice write up on how to build a serviceable render farm out of Butterfly Net Render and Linux. Now typically I would not spend my time discussing the competition, but in this case it deserves a special mention!
The blog post is here, and my thanks to Lonnie for putting in the effort. Without the sharing of knowledge we Linux folk would still be staring at blue screens of death on a regular basis. In the same spirit, my thanks to Barry in his post on the same topic. He used Lonnie's write up as a guide and put his own configuration steps online for aspiring render farmers. Thanks, guys - you are good ambassadors of open source.
Anyway, I enjoyed the post because it illustrates pretty well the entire point of RapidScale Clusters (that's us). Building a linux render farm can be SIMPLE. It can be EASY. It can happen without teams of linux gurus and snippets from seventeen different howtos. That's the whole idea behind RenderFarmer. Fast, shared root, PXE booting diskless node Linux render farms are the way to go when ease of use and scalability are key requirements. There are GUI's for everyday management tasks like submitting jobs and adding and removing nodes. I daresay it's really, really easy. No, it is not free. But it is very affordable and if rendering is a serious issue for you or your organization, it would be pretty difficult to imagine that it's not worth the small price for a subscription to try it out. Or for that matter, to download a 90 day trial and just put the thing to work. If it doesn't save you twice the purchase price in time and effort, don't buy it!
But bringing a node from bare metal (that is, no OS, no render software, nothing) to rendering in 120 seconds is going to save you a ton of time in node configuration and maintenance. Just imagine never having to install anything on any of your nodes... That's what we do here. That's why when I read posts about how a linux guru tweaked and prodded a BNR render farm into existence on linux, against its will and better judgement, I feel compelled to hit the blogosphere myself and evangelize: It doesn't have to be so hard! Linux really IS the best platform for render farms. And some companies knew that from the beginning!