Hi,
Virtualized desktops, cloud computing, distributed renderings… Enterprise servers can help us with our calculations needs as they have massive amounts of RAM and parallelized architectures.
I’ve just received an IBM x3850 m2 server, from a datacenter. It has 4x not so old Xeon Quadcore E7450 what means 16 cores. It has 128 GB Ram, so I’m figuring out about using it as render slave for light baking. At least I want to try it and watching if an 2010 highend corporate server with massive amount of Ram can help to bake fast. Obviously, the first thing is about what OS to use, nor professional or home Windows detects more than two physical processors. Only Server versions.
The first choice I have is to install VMware vSphere 5.1 (recent 5.5 or more don’t likes Xeon E7450) as Hypervisor device on the internal USB flash drive. Over this OS layer I could mount Windows 8.1 virtual machines and swarm agents, (2 or 4)(not Windows 10 as it isn’t formaly compatible with 5.1 vSphere). It means I could add as forcepower to calculations 2 virtual machines (8 threads+64 GB RAM each) o 4 virtual machines (4 threads+32 GB RAM each).
Does somebody has try something similar?. Will do swarm agents run fine on virtual machines?