I currently have a Qube 5.5 render farm running off of a group of Dell Servers which are all Windows 2003 Server based. All of the workers have Maya 2010, 3ds Max Design 2010 and After Effects CS4.
I am mulling over building a fresh worker image, as the current build has been kicking around for over two years since the test phases of the farm. I want to install a 64 bit OS and am looking at Windows 2008 Server given the application support required. Is this OS the best bet considering the hardware/software involved? Later on, when I have the time, I want to rebuild the Supervisor as a Linux box but that will definitely come after the worker build.
Any other advice or tips on the build? Is it worth investing in Mental Ray software to push all Maya mental ray jobs through or is Mental Ray for Maya adequate?
