Mental Ray for Maya not pooling all 5 licenses.

[ekbruster]

As part of our Maya licensing, we have 5 mental ray render license feature strings (flex) for each Maya license.   However, when we submit a job it is only hitting the first feature string.   (i.e.  I have 6 maya licenses, I should be able to render on 30 nodes, but I'm currently only able to use the first 6, and nothing shows up as hitting against the other 4 license strings).

Is this just a setting I'm missing in my jobtype submission?  Thanks in advance.

[jburk]

No, you're not missing anything, we've encountered this issue in the past with some customers in the past using the R1-R5 licenses.

It's always been hard to solve, but has come down to the license server willing to serve an R1 license to the worker, but never anything higher than that.  There are a few things to check:

• are your running the latest version of the adsk_flex daemon that is available for your version of Maya (there have been patch releases from Autodesk for this in Maya 2010)
• are you running the version of the license server that corresponds to the version of Maya (different versions of Maya need different versions of the license server)
• ensure that the license server can resolve the hostname of the worker, both forwards (name->address) and reverse (address->name)

If all else fails, try setting the environment variable ADSKFLEX_LICENSE_FILE on the worker like this:

ADSKFLEX_LICENSE_FILE=@<your-license-server-name-or-ipaddress>

If you're on a Windows machine, ensure that you set a SYSTEM environment variable.

[lineplot]

We're about to deploy the new Maya 2011 network license as above.  As you know, Qube runs Maya jobs "interactively" at the command line level unless it is a "batch" job.  The license allows for 1 GUI job and 5 render jobs, but I wonder if the command-line "interactive" job counts as as a GUI job to the Autodesk license system. 

We had this exact issue back when we were use JoeAlter's Shave Hair system, he counted the Qube job as a GUI job, and we were forced into the less efficient batch processing (reloading the file each time). 

Do you have proof that you can run 5 Maya MR jobs non-batch under one of these new licenses?   To the prior question by ekbruster, you could try running the qube jobs as -batch - does it use all CPUs then?

[jburk]

Qube's "maya" jobtype only consumes a batch license when it runs; if you look in the perl code that starts up Maya (in $QBDIR/jobtypes/maya/*.pm), you'll see that maya is started as

Code: [Select]

maya -batch -prompt
I seem to remember that the Shave and a Haircut plugin used at least a Maya Complete license whenever it was loaded in Maya, even when maya was running in batch mode; that was one of the limitation of the plugin itself.  When you run the "maya BatchRender" jobs (which is a "cmdrange" jobtype), the only executable launched is maya's "Render" executable, not maya itself.

[lineplot]

Super.  Thanks!