I'm revisiting our attempt to get an AferEffects/3D Studio Max render farm running.
The problem is that 32bit AE can't see more than 2GB of RAM. We have 8GB and 8 Cores per blade. My plan was to put four virtualised instances of XP onto each blade - giving each instance of AE 2 cores and 2GB RAM.
I tried the Citrix Hypervisor, but they want $$ for the client application - so I thought I'd give KVM another try. Before, when I went through the various Hypervisors, I was getting correupted video and sessions timing out. Reading around suggested that a firmware upgrade to the chassis (an M1000e) and to each blade would fix this. This has to be the scariest firmware update I've ever done...The chassis has 9 high speed fans on the back which, when up to speed, sound like an F16 - these came on full blast during the upgrade, and for about 5 minutes I thought I'd bricked the whole thing....
...So after the update, no more timeouts or garbled VNC. XP went on fine. When it came to installing AfterEffects though....hmmm
We have AE on a 5 disk installer (Adobe production Premium), disk one was recognised and AE started the install. After a while the installer asked for disk 2 - I tried everything I could to eject the first, and insert the second. I could get the disk ejected, either from XP or from Virtual Machine Manager. But nothing I tried could get the second disk recognised. I even went and had a chat with the KVM developers via IRC - they suggested using the direct libVirt console - but that had the same behaviour....
I think I need to find a 64bit version of AE, and forget about Hypervisors for a while...
The problem is that 32bit AE can't see more than 2GB of RAM. We have 8GB and 8 Cores per blade. My plan was to put four virtualised instances of XP onto each blade - giving each instance of AE 2 cores and 2GB RAM.
I tried the Citrix Hypervisor, but they want $$ for the client application - so I thought I'd give KVM another try. Before, when I went through the various Hypervisors, I was getting correupted video and sessions timing out. Reading around suggested that a firmware upgrade to the chassis (an M1000e) and to each blade would fix this. This has to be the scariest firmware update I've ever done...The chassis has 9 high speed fans on the back which, when up to speed, sound like an F16 - these came on full blast during the upgrade, and for about 5 minutes I thought I'd bricked the whole thing....
...So after the update, no more timeouts or garbled VNC. XP went on fine. When it came to installing AfterEffects though....hmmm
We have AE on a 5 disk installer (Adobe production Premium), disk one was recognised and AE started the install. After a while the installer asked for disk 2 - I tried everything I could to eject the first, and insert the second. I could get the disk ejected, either from XP or from Virtual Machine Manager. But nothing I tried could get the second disk recognised. I even went and had a chat with the KVM developers via IRC - they suggested using the direct libVirt console - but that had the same behaviour....
I think I need to find a 64bit version of AE, and forget about Hypervisors for a while...
